


Curriculum Vitae

by ancientreader



Series: Transports [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, Backstory, Childhood Sexual Abuse, M/M, Part 2 has the happy John/Sherlock ending, Physical Disability, arrives pre-jossed by S3, canon drug use and violence, deaths of important characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 04:17:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 29,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6455434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientreader/pseuds/ancientreader
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How to become a consulting detective.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU, though the characters appear in generally the same configurations as in BBC Sherlock. I began it well before S3 aired, so the Holmes parents aren't characterized as in the series. And Mary Morstan, who has a cameo in Part 2, may be taken at face value.
> 
> The series has two parts and is complete (but for a short epilogue); later chapters are longer and will post at least weekly after the first batch. **Please heed the tags; the story includes explicit descriptions of sexual abuse, both of Sherlock and of another character.** I'll flag the chapters in which explicit descriptions occur, but be aware that such abuse is a pervasive theme. Grief and loss also figure, and expect scenes of/references to such violence as a consulting detective may be expected to encounter. I won't warn separately for these.
> 
> All of that having been said, I don't think "Transports" can be called dark. Love prevails, and John and Sherlock get their happy ending. Even though John barely shows up till Part 2!
> 
> My deepest thanks to my wife who is the best wife, to [TSylvestris](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TSylvestris/pseuds/TSylvestris), and to [Chryse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Chryse/pseuds/Chryse), who have cheer-led and beta read and held my hand and urged me to have a glass of wine at the many points when it was appropriate to do so. MirithGriffin was helpful and encouraging in the early and middle stages of work on the series. [Frikshun](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Frikshun/profile), who is alarmingly and admirably sharp-eyed, read this after posting and caught a number of glitches that have resulted in her impressment into regular beta-ing. I bet she's sorry now!
> 
> GNU Terry Pratchett.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A family, late 1979 and early 1980.

“I’m your brother,” Sherlock announces. He and Mycroft are watching ants, but the ants are not watching back; they are using their keen sense of smell to follow the trail Sherlock has laid to a piece of bread and jam left over from his breakfast. Sherlock once tried to find his way from the nursery to Mama’s library by smell alone, plugging his ears with loo roll and honorably keeping his eyes screwed tight shut, but he suspects he cheated because he already knew the way. Is it cheating if you don’t mean to do it? Perhaps that is why some people get angry at him when he tells them what he knows about them: they think he learns these things by cheating. 

“Yes, Sherlock. We are brothers.” 

“Whose brother are you?” Indignant now.

“I’m your brother, Sherlock. That surely can’t come as a surprise.”

“Mycroft! I’m the brother. You’re — I don’t know what you are. But I’m the brother. You’re older, you must be something else.”

“Sherlock, you’re my brother and I’m your brother. The relation is a reciprocal one.”

Sherlock sits dumbstruck. His nanny, Miss Banerjee, has shown him that the reciprocal of any number is 1 divided by that number. 34 is the same as 34 divided by 1, and the reciprocal of 34 is 1 divided by 34; all you have to do to produce a reciprocal is flip the relationship about. Miss Banerjee has not yet explained the use of reciprocals — she said Sherlock needed to learn more about fractions first — but their symmetry pleases Sherlock. You could go back and forth all day long, turning a number into its reciprocal and then back again. Neither the number nor its reciprocal ever changed. That was soothing. Now it appears that the same is true of himself and Mycroft: He is Mycroft’s brother, Mycroft is his brother, and the relationship holds whichever way it is expressed. Sherlock takes Mycroft’s hand.

*

 _Anna Holmes_  
_64 Onslow Gardens_  
_London, SW1_

__

_October 30, 1979_

_Dear Anna,_

_It’s been some time since we corresponded, hasn’t it? I hope this letter finds you well and happy — maybe, also, interested in spending some time abroad? Of course I want something from you._

_I have a project. Haven’t I always, but do you know I think this one will be important. I’ll place a bet that you follow the world economic news and so have heard of the World Bank’s issuance to my country’s government of something called a “structural adjustment loan.”_

_As I am a barely qualified historian —_

Anna Holmes snorts; no, the extremely clever eldest daughter of the very first Kenyan ambassador to the UK didn’t take honors at Girton, but that was what came of swanning off to diplomatic receptions instead of meeting with one’s tutors and sitting one’s exams as scheduled.

_— I won’t pretend to understand all the implications, but I spy with my little eye certain provisions in the loan terms which require Kenya to loosen or abandon import tariffs and other such impediments to internationalization._

_Yes, we are to join the world economy — hoorah? I’ve not the faintest notion whether this bodes well or ill but I do suspect that if the present girls of Kenya are to become the prosperous women of Kenya at any later date they had better be provided some scientific, technical, and business education, at speed._

_I’m starting a secondary school meant to prepare girls for university. We have a building, we have a board of governors, we have even begun to solicit applications for staff. Oh darling darling Anna, this is where you come in! I need mathematics and science departments._

“And I’m to pull up my tent poles and come be the maths department?” Anna mutters, trying to be annoyed.

“What?” Robert looks up from the _Guardian._

“Letter from Phoebe Wanjau Mathu. She seems to be working up to demand that I move to Nairobi.” Robert’s eyebrows hit the summit of his forehead, then drop as he returns to his paper.

_I need a teacher to vet prospective staff. I need, specifically, you: a woman maths teacher the better to weed out the sort of male teacher of maths and sciences who makes sure to let girl students know that they’re not quite clever enough._

_Three or four months._

Anna grins. (When did you learn reasonableness, Phoebe?)

_Paid! Paid travel! I’ll throw in a comfortable house. Please say yes. Or, failing that, please enter into negotiations that will end in that result._

_Your old friend —_

_Phoebe W. M._

_P.S. The three or four months to commence as soon as humanly possible._

_P.P.S. Consider this work (paid, let me reiterate) as a portion of the amends due from all Britons to all Kenyans in consequence of your lamentable history of going about the world seeking whom you might, imperially speaking, devour._

Anna hands Robert the letter. By the time he reaches the end, he’s laughing in disbelief, which lasts just until he sees Anna’s expression. “Oh, my God. You want to go.” 

She draws up her face into a primate’s appeasing grin (squinting, lips drawn back over the teeth). “You’ve met Phoebe. Notice that she sounds entirely larky, but the building and the board of governors are in place, and she’s begun staffing? Notice that she knows exactly what she doesn’t want in a male teacher and has picked me to vet applicants because I in turn know exactly what she’s talking about, having experienced it?” (Notice, Anna doesn’t say, and doesn’t have to, how powerful a lure she’s dangling in front of me — namely, the power to protect other girls from the scoffing and condescension I put up with? It would be tempting to feel manipulated, were the cause not such a good one.)

“I wonder whether I can get leave from the residence,” Robert says, mock-resigned. Anna beams at him. “Mycroft can visit at term break,” he goes on. “Only, what about Miss Banerjee? What shall we do with Sherlock, if she doesn’t agree to come?”

*

“Tell me about Kenya.”

“I haven’t been there, Sherlock. I can only report what I’ve read. It’s hot and wet, but not as much in Nairobi as in other parts of the country. That’s because Nairobi is higher up. Hmm. Most people in Africa have darker skin than most people in England, and curly hair — like your hair, but much tighter curls. The food is different to ours, because the climate is tropical, so the vegetables that grow there are not the same as ours. But Kenyans eat chickens and cows as we do, and fish. 

“I imagine you’ll find plenty of experiments to conduct. Miss Banerjee has agreed to come” — Mycroft hopes fervently that this turns out to be true — “and you’ll be with Mama and Papa, of course.”

“Of course.” _Honestly._ Sherlock doesn’t need reassurance! 

Mycroft glances at his brother sidelong. “And I’ll visit on hols.”

“Of course.” Sherlock speaks more primly than before, if that were possible. Mycroft has to look away at this and bite his lip so Sherlock doesn’t see him smile, but he gives Little Brother’s hand a squeeze. The ants continue in their procession.

*

Sherlock loves Miss Banerjee best after Mama and Papa and Mycroft. She came to be Sherlock’s nanny two years ago, when he was three years old and Miss Bellingham’s arthritis got too bad for her to lift Sherlock and chase Sherlock and stand over Sherlock while he put his books away. At first Sherlock hated Miss Banerjee because she in no way resembled Miss Bellingham except in that she was also called “Miss,” and had a surname beginning with “B,” which was irrelevant, but it transpired that Miss Banerjee knew a great deal about ant behavior and also about prime numbers and was less thoroughly opposed than Miss Bellingham had been to Sherlock’s experiments. Just the week before, after they had a lesson concerning evolutionary adaptations among fishes, she had astonished Sherlock to within an inch of his life: she brought him to the kitchen and opened the fridge to reveal a fresh plaice, which she had procured that morning. “Sherlock,” she said, “shall we dissect it together? If you like, I can help you with the fiddly bits. And we can put the gills under my microscope.” Then she put the seal on Sherlock’s eternal worship by letting him use everything but the scalpel from _her own dissecting kit from university._ The anatomy of the plaice’s eyes was all Sherlock could talk about at supper that evening. Papa and Mama declared themselves most impressed.

Miss Banerjee is annoyingly insistent on Sherlock’s washing his hands, sometimes more than once, after each of his experiments, but he forgives this minor defect in her character. 

*

What Sherlock doesn’t know about Sarita Banerjee, because no one has told him and even though he is Sherlock he is also a tiny child, who has not yet accumulated background data sufficient for him to deduce much about adults’ life experiences, is this: She became his nanny because, early in her progress toward her Ph.D. in biochemistry, her parents died in a car accident. Grief made it difficult for Sarita to concentrate, and when the Holmeses, who had known the elder Banerjees socially, offered her the job of taking care of Sherlock as a stopgap till she felt able to resume, she took it. Her own misery masked Sherlock’s initial hatefulness toward her; she perceived only that here was a curious child, in both senses of “curious”; in trying to divert herself by contriving puzzle-projects for him she won him over, so that by the time she might have noticed his baby contempt and rejection they had evaporated. 

To her own surprise, because she has never much liked children, Sarita Banerjee is smitten with Sherlock in return. She sees less of Mycroft, who is at boarding school, and he’s more of a puzzle to her, more contained. Sherlock is all sharp rude clear hungers: Explain! Explain! What is that? Let me see! Give it me! Tell me! That urgency was a balm to her in the months after her parents died. Watching him frown intently over Michael Brian’s _The World of an Ant Hill,_ she imagines him inspecting the marvels of a whole new continent and laughs with pleasure. Then she bites her hand to stop herself: It would strike her to the heart if Sherlock thought she was mocking him. She’ll go to Nairobi, she decides, and resume her work when she comes back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves  
>  Trail with daisies and barley  
> Down the rivers of the windfall light.
> 
> Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”
> 
> For the World Bank and the effect of the structural adjustment loans et seq. on Kenya’s economy, I drew mostly on Geoffrey Gertz’s paper prepared for the Carnegie Endowment, [“Kenya’s Trade Liberalization of the 1980s and 1990s: Policies, Impacts, and Implications.”](http://carnegieendowment.org/files/kenya_background.pdf) Gertz’s report is clearly written and surprisingly interesting even to a complete economic novice like myself. I’ve tried to make Phoebe Wanjau Mathu an alert observer without making her preposterously prescient; she’s correct to foresee how much of an advantage education and skills would be in the coming world. According to Gertz’s paper, unskilled and semiskilled workers have fared badly since the structural adjustments began. 
> 
> Phoebe is completely fictional. I know nothing about the Kenyan ambassador to the UK in the mid-1960s, not even whether there was one. Phoebe’s father would presumably have been the first to hold the post because Kenya was, of course, a British colony until 1963. In her genteel blackmail of Anna, Phoebe very politely avoids referring to the anticolonial Mau Mau rebellion of 1952-1960, which most English people of the time would have seen as straight-up savagery but which actually reflected reasonable grievances (well, yeah, what with being colonized, and all). Atrocities were many on both sides.
> 
> That's for background. Sherlock will spend four months in Kenya at the age of five; it’s all bugs, birds, snakes, plants, and sky to him.


	2. Childhood is the kingdom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock Holmes, aged five, passes some time in Kenya, and something is set in motion.

As Mycroft predicted, Sherlock adores Kenya. He collects insects, grasses, soil samples, animal droppings. He offends Kenyan adults by imitating their speech, and his parents and Miss Banerjee are constantly explaining that his intent is not to mock but to learn for himself how variations in sound are made. 

Things Sherlock wants to know:

Why is the climate is different to England’s. Why does everyone not go about naked in this heat. Why is Miss Banerjee’s skin darker than Sherlock’s but not so dark as most Kenyans’. Why do people wibble on about male lions when anyone can see it’s the lionesses that hunt. Are thatched roofs here made of the same sort of plant as thatch in England. Why is there not an Underground. Do mud bricks not melt when it rains. How many languages are spoken in Kenya. If people listened closely to different languages would they be able to understand them the way Sherlock can understand a person from Liverpool. How many species of beetle live in Kenya and how are they counted. When the male bird and the female bird have different plumage why are they not therefore different species. Why is there not a library of insects where one can study one’s specimens. Why is there no such library in England either. Why is he not provided _kaimati_ to eat every day, which is obviously an injustice. 

Over and over he drags Sarita to buy samples of leaves and seeds from the herbalist whose shop stand, with its blackboard and tidy array of bottles and envelopes, occupies a shaded patch of pavement outside the Central Bus Station. Mr. Muturi hardly needs their custom, and Sarita thinks he must long to be flown on the wings of eagles to a different location when she and Sherlock appear. Sometimes, she admits to Anna Holmes one evening after Sherlock has been extremely interrogational all day even for him, she wouldn’t mind being flown on the wings of eagles either.

*

Miss Banerjee and Sherlock begin lessons together in Kiswahili three days a week; it is felt, or at least hoped, that the work of learning a language so different to English will exercise Sherlock’s mind enough to quiet it. At least somewhat. At least a little. Their instructor is Jackson Obudha, a sixth-form prefect at the Nairobi School. Jackson gives serious consideration to quitting during the second week, when Miss Banerjee leaves the room briefly and thereby gives Sherlock time to initiate the following exchange:

> Sherlock: Why don’t you ever look at Miss Banerjee?
> 
> Jackson: [darts glance at the door out which Sarita has gone, then glares at Sherlock]
> 
> Sherlock: You look at everything else.
> 
> Jackson: […]
> 
> Sherlock: It can’t be that you don’t want to look at her, she’s lovely.
> 
> Jackson: […]
> 
> Sherlock: _Oh!_
> 
> Jackson: Sherlock Holmes, if you say one more word I’ll thrash you.
> 
> Sherlock: [subsides, looking gleeful]  
> 

Jackson goes home after the lesson, though he has been invited to stay for supper. His absence is fortunate.

At supper that night. Dramatis personae: Sherlock, Sarita, Anna, and Robert.

> Sherlock [scraping the tines of his fork over the tablecloth and noting the effect they have on the nap when drawn at various angles to the weave]: Miss Banerjee, do you know why Mr. Obudha won’t look at you?
> 
> [Anna, Robert, and Sarita all turn to Sherlock.]
> 
> Sherlock: Do you?
> 
> Sarita [prevaricating]: That might be Mr. Obudha’s business, Sherlock, rather than ours.
> 
> Sherlock: But if he would look at you, then I wouldn’t notice him not looking at you. It’s only his own fault if people can tell things about what he’s thinking because he makes them notice it.
> 
> Robert: People can’t always help where they look, Sherlock.
> 
> Sherlock: But I don’t understand, because if he thinks Miss Banerjee is beautiful, why wouldn’t he look at her all the time? I think she’s beautiful, and I look at her.  
> 

At this point, one thought balloon will serve for all three of the adults at the table. In it are the words _How on earth do we even begin to explain?_

> Sarita [faintly]: Thank you, Sherlock. 
> 
> [A brief silence.]
> 
> Anna [taking up the gauntlet]: I think Mr. Obudha’s feelings are somewhat different from yours, Sherlock. They may cause him embarrassment, so even though you notice them, it would be kind to pretend that you don’t.
> 
> Sherlock: But why would he be embarrassed to think that Miss Banerjee is beautiful? It’s not as if he’s wrong. If he were wrong, that would be embarrassing.
> 
> [Another silence, during which the adults busy themselves biting the insides of their cheeks.]
> 
> Anna: Sherlock, dear, you’ll need to take this on trust. When Mr. Obudha is present, please don’t raise the topic of where he does or doesn’t look.
> 
> Sherlock: But he’s the best source of information on the subject! If I don’t ask him questions, I can’t verify my hypotheses!
> 
> [All three adults give Sherlock a Look, with individual variations.]
> 
> Sherlock [pouting]: Oh, all right. But you haven’t said I can’t ask questions about him when he’s _not_ present.  
> 

 

Attendance at a boys’ prep school has steeled Jackson Obudha’s nerves, so he doesn’t quit tutoring at the Holmeses’, and he does train himself to look at Miss Banerjee from time to time; from time to time, Sarita for her part eyes Sherlock quellingly. Neither of the gentlemen present has anything to say on the subject of her beauty, at least not while she’s in the room.

*

Anna Holmes and Phoebe Wanjau Mathu are having a quiet rant together one afternoon in the lounge of the Holmeses’ house: “If you can believe this, Phoebe, I asked him why he had applied for the post when he had neither an undergraduate degree in mathematics nor any teaching qualifications, and he told me it hardly mattered since the girls would need only enough arithmetic to double or halve a recipe.” 

“Well, I hope you set him straight, Anna. No proper Kenyan woman needs _recipes_.” A dual giggle ensues, followed by the clink of whisky glasses. Phoebe sighs and stretches back in her chair, giving herself a view of the glass doors. “What’s Sherlock doing in the garden with a net, Anna?” 

“Ah. That would be for one of his experiments. He’s sampling the insect population at different times of day to see which species are active when, and in what parts of the yard. He swishes the net ten times and then counts up all the insects he catches and takes notes on what kinds they are.”

“Does he now?” Phoebe contemplates her friend’s child. Small, skinny, completely focused. “That’s clever. Are he and his brother alike?”

“Intellectually, yes. Very much. Mycroft is more … drawn in. And more drawn in as he gets older.”

“Mmm,” says Phoebe. “But both of them take after you.”

Tartly: “Then you know why I worry for them both.”

Phoebe barks something more or less like a laugh. “Oh yes. A toast to being not quite like the others.”

Another clink of glasses, then: “Anna, your Sherlock’s just given me a mad idea. The ICIPE.”

“And that is … ?”

Phoebe arranges her face for maximum seriousness. “The International Centre for Insect Physiology and Endocrinology. For now, a series of sheds with an elaborate name, but. The director took his doctorate at Cambridge, just when you and I arrived … fellow Cantabridgians, encourage future researchers, laboratory internships, et cetera …” Anna is already nodding vigorously. “Yes,” Phoebe concludes. “Let’s call on Dr. Odhiambo at his earliest convenience.”

The meeting takes place the following week. It’s a resounding success. Afterward, neither Anna nor Phoebe says aloud how much Sherlock would love the Centre, or how they don’t dare bring him near it when they need to make a sober and courteous impression on its eminent director, who is palpably aware of his eminence. When she feels like a traitor, Anna reminds herself that, for once, what one might say of Sherlock would probably be true of almost any other five-year-old. If for different reasons. 

*

Sherlock wakes one Saturday cranky and feverish. Miss Banerjee’s off for the weekend but stops in on her way to lunch with a vacationing friend. It’s odd and a bit disturbing to see Sherlock quiet in a dark room, but with a cool compress on his forehead he doesn’t seem too uncomfortable. Sarita gives him a kiss, refreshes the compress, and goes to find Anna and Robert, who are in the kitchen; she’s reading with her feet up while he dismembers a chicken for soup. “Cures everything,” Anna says. 

“He’s not sneezing or coughing?” Sarita says.

“No. Well, kids do get fevers and his temperature’s not so high. I’ve left a message with Phoebe’s doctor, just in case, but probably all he needs is a day’s sleep.” 

Sarita’s lunch date unexpectedly turns into cocktails at the Ambassador Hotel, but when she gets home the pleasant tipsy glow dissipates; Sherlock’s no better. He’s no better on Sunday, either, and his fever’s up; Sarita feels a belly-twitch of unease. She has been going over the past several days in her mind, trying to work out where Sherlock might have picked up his symptoms, but nothing has occurred to her. They had lessons at home, they took walks on which they ate and drank nothing they hadn’t brought from home, Sherlock netted insects in the garden, Jackson Obudha came and diligently looked at Sarita and taught them how to make the future tense in Kiswahili. Jackson and his family are perfectly well; Anna phoned on Saturday morning to check. 

Sarita doesn’t sleep well Sunday night. On Monday, when she leaves her suite of rooms to join the Holmeses and take up her nanny-hood, she finds Robert pacing and Anna chewing on her left forefinger, something she does only when seriously worried. Sherlock is still feverish, and now he’s headachy with it and fretting at the skin of his calves and thighs: “Prickles,” he complains. Dr. Kamathi phones a few minutes later; his alarm is audible in Anna’s thin, strained voice as she answers his questions. “No, the fever hasn’t gone down at all – it’s up to nearly 40. Yes, pins and needles. Headache. Is his neck stiff? I don’t know. _Is his neck stiff?_ But you can’t be thinking – Yes, yes of course he has. The entire course of four. We finished a month before we left London.”

Robert is staring at Anna, his arms folded tight. “But it’s hardly possible,” he says urgently when she hangs up. 

“He says we had better bring Sherlock to the hospital – even if it’s not that, he thinks Sherlock is seriously ill. There’s” – Anna clears her throat –“there’s quite a new intensive care ward. And of course they’d have more experience than the embassy doctor if …”

“Excuse me,” says Sarita. “What are we talking about here?”

The Holmeses are already moving: car keys, house keys, blanket to wrap Sherlock in. Robert gapes for a moment, then seems to see Sarita clearly. “Right. Right.” He sounds almost angry. “You’re twenty years younger than we are. You’ve never in your life seen it, have you?

“Sherlock has polio.”

*

Dr. Kamathi meets them at the Nairobi Hospital casualty entrance. Because Phoebe’s a VIP and so, therefore, are the Holmeses, half an hour later Sherlock is lying on a bed in the posh North Wing where Jomo Kenyatta himself was treated, and has a nurse of his own to boot. His neck is limber (“So far,” Dr. Kamathi says, tactlessly) but he’s still rubbing at the pins and needles in his legs and when a cramp seizes his left calf Sherlock cries out once and then sits forward, his face set. He should be complaining and demanding explanations; this silent endurance terrifies. The nurse clicks her tongue and darts out, returning almost immediately with warm moist towels that she lays over Sherlock’s legs; he hisses but then leans back as the cramping eases from his calf. Robert holds Sherlock’s right hand and Sherlock clenches his left fist on cue while the nurse taps for a blood vessel. He turns his head toward her as she works but he hardly seems to be watching.

The paracetamol and cool compresses at home haven’t knocked down his fever much – he’s still hovering at nearly 39 degrees – so Dr. Kamathi orders ibuprofen. Then he takes Anna and Robert and Sarita out into the hall. “You are absolutely certain he was immunized?” Anna and Robert nod numbly. “Then something must have gone wrong with the vaccine. This is a textbook case of the paralytic form of polio: several days of fever followed by headache, pins and needles, and muscle cramping. It could not be more clear.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know how it’s possible. We have scarcely seen the disease in Nairobi for a good few years.”

No one has anything to say to this. 

“All right. I’d like to speak with your son’s pediatrician in London, if possible. Your best bet for getting through quickly on international lines is your embassy and you may want to be in touch with the doctor there anyhow, in case you need to arrange a medical evacuation.” “Tactless,” Sarita decides, isn’t even the word for Dr. Kamathi. He really, really had better be good. He’s Phoebe’s doctor, she reminds herself.

“You two” – he nods toward Robert and Anna – “probably remember, more or less, what happens to patients with polio. All we can do is to treat his symptoms and hope the paralysis does not progress. We’ll have a better idea of the child’s prognosis in a week or so.”

“The child”! Sarita is bleakly amused: in keeping with his general emotional obliviousness, it seems Kamathi hasn’t quite managed to learn Sherlock’s name. Anna is crying softly, curled against Robert who leans against the wall. Sarita wishes to God she had someone to curl against right now, or could lean against a wall, but apparently what she’s here for is to take charge. She parks Robert in a chair by Sherlock’s bed and leads Anna downstairs to get a cab to the embassy.

*

The embassy doctor is very busy, the receptionist begins, but Anna has recovered her composure on the taxi ride over and explains in pitiful tones (very pitiful indeed, Sarita notes with admiration; she hasn’t heard Anna sounding quite like that before, and the act is all the more impressive because she knows both how frightened Anna really is, and that she would never voluntarily reveal her genuine distress to a complete stranger: so Anna is shamming _public_ distress in order to take care of Sherlock for whose sake she is in the deepest possible _real and private_ distress) that she may need to arrange a medical evacuation for her five-year-old son, which makes the receptionist melt and page the doctor urgently. More memorable yet is the sight of the blood leaving the doctor’s face at the word “polio.” If Anna weren’t Anna, he might have succeeded in postponing revelation till after she had spoken with Sherlock’s pediatrician, but Anna is Anna and in a moment the doctor is pulling a telex out from near the bottom of the I-have-dealt-with-these-pieces-of-paper-and-can-now-discard-them spike on his desk. He gets paler yet when he realizes he’s got hold of not one telex but two. Two telexes, the first one ignored because the second was overlooked. First:

“Alert concerning lots no. 3457 and 3498 of the oral polio vaccine manufactured by Ewing Pharmaceuticals, 5,000 doses of each of which were distributed between 1979 and 1980 to the following private clinics in London …”

… including the clinic where the Holmeses’ pediatrician works, but not including any clinics in Kenya, so why is this notice being sent here? Spike. The accompanying telex, the second one, the overlooked one, begins “Please see attached vaccine alert” and is signed by that very pediatrician, who knows the Holmeses are in Nairobi because he administered the children’s yellow fever and typhoid vaccinations but who has no means of getting in touch with Anna and Robert directly. _Please find them,_ the pediatrician concludes. _Their five-year-old son has not been adequately immunized against polio._

Sarita can actually see Anna’s hands trembling with the effort of not screaming and throwing things. She herself has to sit down, because otherwise she’ll faint.

*

Robert has better control of his temper than Anna has of hers, and they need to spell each other at the hospital anyway, so it’s he who goes to the embassy doctor’s office a couple of hours later to phone Mycroft’s headmaster. The doctor is most obliging. Every facility is theirs, and so on.

You would have to know Mycroft very well to see him flinch when Robert breaks the news, but the headmaster doesn’t know Mycroft that well. Mycroft asks whether he ought to come; his voice is level. _Cold fish,_ thinks the headmaster. “It’s almost end of term anyway, Headmaster,” Mycroft says when he’s off the phone, eyes fixed on the middle distance. The headmaster has already drawn his conclusions, so the detail of Mycroft’s gaze escapes him.

Mycroft these days affects a brass-topped cane he turned up at an Oxfam store. On the flight to Nairobi Tuesday morning, he sits straight, holding the cane between his knees. He doesn’t read or do any schoolwork. _It’s almost end of term anyway._ He sits in Sherlock’s hospital room in the same position. The chair is where it was when he came in, in the corner across from the bed where the cleaners left it after they washed the floor. Sitting straight, hands on his cane, looking straight ahead, Mycroft has the foot of Sherlock’s bed within his line of sight. He concentrates on his breathing. One; two. One; two. He matches his breathing with Sherlock’s breathing, which he can just hear. One; two. _Don’t; don’t. Don’t; don’t._ Don’t what. _Don’t._

Anna, back from fetching them bottles of fizzy water from the shop just outside the hospital grounds, stands in the door, watching her elder son watch the foot of the bed. “Sweetheart,” she says after a few moments, “sweetheart, budge up, will you?” She shoves herself into the chair next to Mycroft, an arm around his shoulders, and kisses his cheek. On the cane, Mycroft’s hands relax. 

*

There were layers of protection between Sherlock and the poliovirus. Kenya is near to eradicating the disease. Most children are vaccinated. More and more people have access to clean water for drinking. Everyone in their upper-middle-class neighborhood, Kenyans and European expats alike, has a flush toilet connected with a sealed cesspit.

More. Ninety percent of people infected by the poliovirus never get sick. 

Ninety percent of people infected by the poliovirus don’t get sick, and now comes the part of the story that Sarita Banerjee doesn’t know, and the Holmeses don’t know, and nobody else knows or will ever know, not even Sherlock.

Among the happy ninety percent are three members of the Wakiihuri family, who were infected when they attended a wedding in the rural north. The healthy Wakiihuris live next door to the Holmeses, and like the Holmeses they have a flush toilet connected to a sealed cesspit. 

But the Wakiihuris’ builder was suffering from a cash flow problem just when he was due to pour the concrete for the cesspit. He didn’t tell them so. Instead, to save money he added more water to the cement than he should have, and now there is a fine crack running vertically along the tank, underground and unknown.

Two weeks after the Wakiihuris are infected, and thus while they are still shedding virus, Nairobi enjoys a rainstorm. A pool of water collects at the bottom of the Wakiihuris’ garden, where it borders the Holmeses’. The rainwater in the pool is mixed with traces of runoff from the cracked cesspit.

Sherlock doesn’t happen to have his magnifying glass in his pocket, so when he looks into the pool on hands and knees to see what tiny things might be hatching there, he brings his face very close to the surface of the water. 

He licks his lips dry impatiently.

The virus spreads over his body like a handful of sugar scattering over a table.

Later, when he’s a grown man who for years on end never thinks of polio, such secret chains of causality are Sherlock’s meat, Sherlock’s drink, Sherlock’s cocaine; for a long time, Sherlock believes, his one true love.

*

As it turns out … as it turns out, the wave sweeps over the village but almost all the residents reach high ground in time; as it turns out, the car overturns but the steel supports holding up the roof are adequate to the stress and the passenger compartment remains intact; as it turns out, the boy falls through the thin March ice but is able to drag himself out of the water and, shaking, crawl to shore.

As it turns out, Sherlock loses the ability to move his left leg for a period of twenty-seven hours, and then, over a day and then another day and then a week, gets the movement back. After two weeks, he leaves the hospital, using a crutch but already putting some weight on the damaged leg. There’s no visible difference between the muscles of his left calf and the muscles of his right. After a month, he no longer needs the crutch, though the foot sometimes drags briefly late in the day. After two months, he begins to forget the strange feverish days and the way it made him feel sick and dizzy to look at his parents’ tight faces, at Miss Banerjee’s bloodshot eyes, at Mycroft’s hands wrapped around the brass head of a cane, and to forget, also, that the night nurse was stealing something from the hospital, he never did work out what, but it was somehow important that she keep doing it, and of all the nurses she was the most gentle in giving his crampy, weak leg massages, so he never told.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ["Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies."](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/childhood-kingdom-where-nobody-dies)
> 
> _Kaimati_ are sweet fried dumplings in cardamom syrup. Mwangi Njeru Muturi was an herbalist who had a stand by the Nairobi Central Bus Station beginning in 1971. He specialized in stomach disorders. I found out about him in the children’s book _We Live in Kenya,_ by Zulf M. Khalfan and Mohamed Amin (1980).
> 
> The Prince of Wales School was founded in 1929 (with earlier antecedents) and modeled on the English public school Winchester. In 1965 it was renamed the Nairobi School, and the next year the board of governors got its first African chairman. It’s still in existence. As a sixth-form prefect, Jackson Obudha would probably be eighteen or nineteen years old. 
> 
> I got the idea for Sherlock’s backyard experiment [here](https://archive.org/details/HowManyBugsAreThere). [The International Centre for Insect Physiology and Endocrinology](http://www.icipe.org/) (now “Ecology”) was founded in 1970 by T. R. Odhiambo, who did indeed take his Ph.D. (insect physiology) at Cambridge in 1965: “ ‘The idea was actually very simple, get the very best people and then if you have more money, put buildings and equipment around them.’ In the beginning money was in short supply at icipe, and the Centre’s headquarters comprised ... a number of rented wood-frame barracks perched on the hillside of Chiromo Campus at the University of Nairobi. The first postdoctoral researcher arrived to work in a garage that flooded when it rained and the budget was improvised from week to week.” Dr. Odhiambo remained the director till 1993 and died in 2003. 
> 
> Odhiambo wanted to turn ICIPE into a university, and that hasn’t happened, but the organization does fascinating entomological and conservation research (on sustainable pest control, for instance) and you should totally go geek out on their website. I have no idea how he might have felt about Sherlock; possibly I should have given him the benefit of the doubt.
> 
> I … had to handwave the polio vaccine issue. When I had the idea of giving Sherlock postpolio syndrome – tricky enough, given he grew up in England well after vaccination had eradicated the disease there – I didn’t know that polio vaccine is administered in several doses. So for Sherlock’s immunization plausibly to fail him, he would probably have had to miss more than one dose. It’s kind of an eye-roller that the Holmes family clinic got two bad batches of vaccine just when Sherlock would have been getting immunized. But by the time I got to researching this I was completely committed to the postpolio plot and how it brings Sherlock bang up against his contempt for the “transport.” 
> 
> In case it needs saying: the bad batches of polio vaccine are fictional, as is their manufacturer, and vaccines have saved the lives of many of the people you know. All the dangerous and terrible diseases they might otherwise have had are, of course, invisible, whereas occasional side effects are very visible. 
> 
> I couldn’t find any information about household sanitation systems in Nairobi in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The cesspits are my best guess because they’re what you usually have if there’s no central sewage system.


	3. Tutelary Deity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beginning with the summer of 1981.
> 
> pâro
>
>> n. the feeling that no matter what you do it is always somehow wrong—that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo—as if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody else can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, colder, colder, colder.
>>
>>> -from [The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows](http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/52394113596/p%C3%A2ro)  
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be aware that this chapter includes some off-stage abuse of an animal, not by Sherlock.

Miss Banerjee says: “You’re starting at grammar school in September.”

Sherlock looks down and sideways, as if Miss Banerjee had ceased to exist. A hundred and fifty years ago, this communication was called the Cut Direct. 

“I know you know that already, Sherlock, you needn’t go all nineteenth-century offended gentleman.” Sherlock has no idea what Miss Banerjee means by this, but he responds to the smile in her voice by returning his gaze to hers. She takes his hand. “I also know you know that I’ll be returning to my studies then, and I won’t be here every day as your nanny.” 

A tiny nod.

“But I shall be your friend. We shall write to each other; I’ll come for supper on the first Sunday of every month, and I’ll be sure to arrive early enough for you to show me whatever experiments you’ve been working on. Also, Sherlock, there’s someone waiting to meet you in your mother’s library.”

“It’s not another nanny,” Sherlock says, every inch the Person Upon Whom No One Can Put Anything Over. “I’d have been told. And I’d have heard her arrive.” 

“Right you are. Your new acquaintance is far removed from a nanny. In fact, I don’t think he’s qualified for any position of responsibility whatever. Coming?” Miss Banerjee is already halfway down the hall. Sherlock bolts after her.

It’s Silvanus who’s in the library. But he’s not yet named Silvanus; he’s not named anything until the next day, when Sherlock looks up wild-eyed from a dictionary of mythologies and breathes it at the glass of the tank: “ _Silvanus._ Silvanus Silvanus Silvanus. ‘A tutelary deity of woods and fields.’ What’s ‘tutelary,’ Miss Banerjee?”

*

Kernels of Indian corn. Sunflower seeds. Slender ribbons of raw kale. The smallest carrot dice Sherlock can cut, breathing through his mouth to help himself concentrate. Banana slices. Puffed rice. Sherlock experiments with all of these but can’t work out which ones Silvanus likes best. First, he places one of each item at a set distance from Silvanus and then times the rat’s approach, but soon confounding factors become clear: At each trial run, Silvanus must be less hungry than at the one previous, because each run ends with his eating the … “ _Reinforcer,_ ” Sherlock reminds himself, under his breath. “Treat” sounds unscientific. He might present all of the treats at once, arrayed, say, half a meter from Silvanus, but the trea— _reinforcers_ had varyingly intense odors. Silvanus might approach the more strongly scented items first only because he perceives them first; the intensity of the odor might not match up with the … palatability (not “tastiness”!) of the offered food. Finally Mycroft, suitably envious of Sherlock’s new experimental subject, points out that even if Sherlock can’t work out Silvanus’s favorite, any treat (“Mycroft! It’s a food reinforcer!”) the rat will work to earn will serve Sherlock’s purposes. (“You can’t know in advance whether it’s a reinforcer, Sherlock. You only learn that later, when you discover whether receiving it has increased the likelihood of the target behavior.” There’s no more satisfactory way to tease Sherlock, Mycroft has found, than to correct his use of scientific terminology.) (Sherlock narrows his eyes at Mycroft. “I’d like to bite you.”) 

In his cage, Silvanus is at work on a quarter of a Weetabix. He’s a beautiful rat, of the color variety called Black Badger. 

Everything about Silvanus is neat and elegant, particularly his pink toes and the translucent loops of his ears, and he makes a warm, breathing bundle in Sherlock’s cupped hands. He hops on by invitation, a trick Sherlock has taught him. After several months of careful instruction, Silvanus will also climb a small, rat-size ladder, jump through a hoop, touch the end of a chopstick with his nose even when Sherlock presents the chopstick as much as a meter away, and turn to Sherlock at the sound of his name. His fur is silky. He is a manifestly clever rat and Sherlock takes pains to keep his life interesting by providing him regular lessons and elaborating his enormous cage with tunnels, boxes, and a shallow pool with stepping-stones. There had been a papier-mâché mountain range, as well, handmade by Sherlock, but it had to go because Silvanus persisted in eating it. The turreted plastic castle that has replaced the mountain range is vastly inferior in every way except for its durability. Silvanus will run up to the top of it to greet Sherlock when Sherlock awakens in the morning and says “Good morning, Silvanus.” 

*

At Christmas break, when Mycroft visits, Sherlock shows off every one of Silvanus’s accomplishments. “That’s well done,” Mycroft allows. The eight years between them seem immense; he wishes he could keep Sherlock as he is, six years old, delighting everyone around him. He thinks he can just remember a time when, like Sherlock now, he had no idea how lonely it is possible to be. 

Mycroft turns away from the thought. There’s no use in wishing for what is contrary to fact; one must simply address the situation as it is; and caring, he reminds himself, is not an advantage. He watches as Sherlock touches his lips to Silvanus’s head and replaces the rat in his cage, then levers himself up from the floor, barely favoring his left leg.

*

Mycroft’s understanding of how agreeable people find Sherlock is outdated. To wit:

“I’m Alan,” the boy at the desk next to Sherlock’s had said on the first day of school.

“Yes, I know.”

“What? How d’you know?”

“It’s embroidered on your rucksack. Well, I suppose you could’ve borrowed the rucksack. Or stolen it. But not likely.”

Alan had gaped at Sherlock for a moment. A string of saliva connected his upper and lower teeth.

“What’s your name?”

“Sherlock.”

“Sherlock? What sort of name is that?”

“Anglo-Saxon, I think.”

“Anglo what? It sounds like a girl’s name.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it does sound like a girl’s name, that’s why.”

“But. If I’m the only person you’ve ever met named Sherlock, and I’m a boy, then why does it sound like a girl’s name to you?”

Alan had frowned at Sherlock. But why did he frown? And then why did he turn away and start in talking to the boy on the other side of him instead of carrying on talking with Sherlock? Why did he think “Sherlock” sounded like a girl’s name? That might have been interesting to discuss, what phonetic qualities or associations made different names seem to belong to different kinds of people. 

Perhaps Alan had remembered something important he had to say to the other boy.

But Alan doesn’t talk to him again that day, and the next morning when Sherlock greets him Alan says “Hello, Sherly-Girly,” in a singsong voice, and when Sherlock replies, “My name is Sherlock,” Alan snickers. So does the boy on the other side.

*

Whatever angle Sherlock considers it from, school is a disappointment. The six-year-olds are being taught to read; Sherlock has been able to read since he was three. The six-year-olds are being taught to add numbers of one digit; two years ago, Miss Banerjee taught Sherlock how to convert fractions to decimals, and then convert them back again. Often — no, usually — the teacher is unable to answer his questions. One afternoon the children take turns describing their pets and showing photographs, but when Sherlock explains that he has not got a pet but does have an experimental subject and shows his favorite photos of Silvanus, a series of five in which Silvanus climbs up Sherlock’s left arm to his shoulder, over his head, and down his right arm, the girls squeal and the boys make retching noises until the teacher shushes them and Sherlock resumes his seat. At playtime that day (boring), Alan and another boy follow Sherlock around hissing “Sherly is a rat boy” until Sherlock points out loudly enough for everyone to hear that Alan’s trousers are unbuttoned so that his pants show in the gap and the other boy has a large dried sneeze on the front of his shirt. The playtime monitor reprimands Sherlock and sends him indoors. Sherlock tells himself he doesn’t mind at all.

After school is better. Because Miss Banerjee has returned to university and to the studies that will transform her into Dr. Banerjee, Sherlock’s father picks him up each afternoon and brings him back to the residence he manages, only a few streets away. At the end of Papa’s workday, he and Sherlock together take the tube home. Papa has explained to Sherlock that the people living at the residence have brain illnesses that sometimes make them see or hear unusual things; when the ill people talk about the things they see and hear, or try to have a conversation, they may be muddled and confusing. All this is true, but Sherlock has found that if he listens with care he can often work out the direction of a torrent of words. This game is much more interesting than anything going on in school; Sherlock develops a scoring system, one point awarded for every reply he makes that elicits agreement or enthusiasm, one point subtracted for every reply that elicits denial or obvious disappointment. If he doesn’t feel like playing or if all of the residents are sleeping or rocking or making pottery or having a therapy visit, Sherlock reads or plans new experiments in Papa’s office.

*

One day, a few weeks after school starts, Sherlock’s teacher brings him out of the classroom and into the hallway, where she passes custody of him to a third-year teacher whose name he does not know. Up, up they go around the central staircase and along the second-story corridor. The teacher opens a door at the end of the corridor and leads Sherlock in. “This,” she announces to the fifteen nine-year-olds in the room, “is Sherlock Holmes. You’re having so much trouble with your reading, perhaps it’ll shame you into working harder if you see what a six-year-old can do. Here” — and she takes up a book from her desk and thrusts it at Sherlock.

All the adults Sherlock has ever known have delighted in watching his brain at work. So far the only exception he knows of is his regular teacher. Also, he hasn’t met very many nine-year-olds. He opens the book to the first page and begins: 

“ ‘Chapter One. Down the Rabbit Hole. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversation?” ’ ”

Sherlock turns to the teacher. “But the sister might be reading a scientific text,” he says. “Generally those are illustrated, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that included conversation. Why does this Alice person think a book without conversation wouldn’t be any use?”

The teacher doesn’t reply; Sherlock perceives that she is confused and surprised, but by what? He looks out at the nine-year-olds behind their desks and discovers on their faces a combination of the teacher’s look with a second expression that he recognizes from his daily encounters with Alan and doesn’t, yet, know how to characterize. And the feeling he has in his stomach now has been growing familiar in these past weeks: a sensation of unease, the awareness that he has said or done something that angers people and makes them dislike him, while having no idea what that is. 

Carefully, Sherlock closes the book and sets it down on the teacher’s desk; then he brings the fingers of his left hand up to his lower lip and rests them there, while he waits to see what will happen next. He inserts nothing of his own into the silence with which the nine-year-olds’ teacher leads him back to the first-year classroom, where he lets himself in and returns to his seat. Mama will be able to explain, he’s sure. 

*

Robert and Anna share an evening cigarette on the back steps after she puts Sherlock to bed. 

“School’s no better for him than it was for Mycroft,” Robert says: stating the obvious, so as to open the subject. Anna nods. Both of them noticed weeks ago how subdued Sherlock is in the mornings, on his way to school, and every afternoon Robert watches the fizz surge back into him as soon as he’s out the school doors. 

“I have no idea, no idea at all, what to do for him,” Anna says. “And you’re quite right, it’s Mycroft all over again. There’s nothing wrong with them” — her voice turns fierce — “there is not a single thing wrong with our children. I am on a hamster wheel over this, Rob. I think of getting Sherlock a private tutor for a few years, but was it any help to Mycroft? Off he went to school finally, eleven years old, and if anything I think he was worse off for the extra time spent ignorant of every nitwit idea of what’s normal. Now here’s Sherlock, in what’s meant to be a program for especially clever children, and do you know what happened today? His teacher turned him over to someone who trotted him out in front of a bunch of third-formers to embarrass them into working harder on their reading. She handed him _Alice in Wonderland_ to read aloud to them, and he stopped after the first paragraph to ask whether Alice’s sister might not have been reading a scientific text, because that would explain why there wasn’t any conversation in it. While I was tucking him in, he asked me whether I knew why the teacher didn’t answer him.”

Robert winces. “He didn’t tell me.”

“He has a grand time every afternoon at that residence of yours. I imagine it distracts him.” Both Holmeses know, but don’t say, that Sherlock’s aware which parent is brilliant and strange, and which parent is kind, reasonably intelligent, and extraordinary mainly in his uncomplicated admiration for his wife.

“The thing is,” Robert says finally, “I think you must be a better judge than I am, of what’s best for Mycroft and Sherlock. Or, any road, what’s least awful for them. You’re the one they take after — it’s your way of thinking about the world that they’ve got. Your brains. What was the best thing for you, when you were six or fourteen?”

“Oh, God! The best thing. The best thing was being alone with my maths texts. I made a few friends at university, like Phoebe, but there really was no best thing until I met you.” 

“We could clone me,” Robert tries, extinguishing the cigarette.

Anna begins to laugh helplessly.

*

Anna has found a veterinarian who trained in the care of laboratory rats before joining a private clinic where he specializes in “exotics” — rodents and reptiles, mainly. Sherlock is of the opinion that a snake or an iguana would make a less interesting experimental subject than does Silvanus, but once Mr. Tutwiler has given Silvanus a careful physical examination and pronounced him in the pink of ratty health, it occurs to Sherlock to wonder how Mr. Tutwiler judges the health of a reptile, with its demeanor so much less expressive than Silvanus’s. Mr. Tutwiler offers the example of a healthy snake: Its eyes will be bright, its body well muscled, and its scales smooth. The snake will appear alert. The snake’s respirations will be free of wheez— 

A commotion erupts outside; “Excuse me, Sherlock,” Mr. Tutwiler says as he throws open the door from the examining room where they’re speaking. Sherlock checks the latch on Silvanus’s travel cage and then follows.

In the waiting room, Sherlock’s mother has risen to her feet, her eyes wide and her right hand pressed against her mouth. Also in the waiting room stand two persons, a girl of about ten and, several feet away from her, a boy exactly Sherlock’s height. The girl’s shirtfront and her trousers are spattered with blood. “He can’t be dead, he can’t be!” she implores Mr. Tutwiler. “He’s still breathing.” 

“Mr. Wethers will do everything he can, young lady. Let’s phone your parents to let them know you’re here — do you think you can manage to remember your phone number just now?” replies Mr. Tutwiler. But Sherlock isn’t watching the girl and Mr. Tutwiler; he’s watching the boy, who is in turn watching Sherlock. 

“What’s wrong with your rat?” the boy asks. 

“I don’t know,” Sherlock replies, slowly. “He might be dying.” 

“My cat is dying,” says the boy. “I fell on him by accident.” 

“Oh!” says Sherlock. “That’s too bad.” 

“It’s my brother’s birthday!” the girl cries, sounding startled. “It is,” the boy says. “It’s my birthday.”

Now Anna Holmes has turned her gaze to Sherlock, eyes narrowed just the way Sherlock’s own eyes narrow when he’s thinking hard. “Careful,” she mouths at him over the boy’s head. Sherlock circles around toward her, still watching the boy, his arm curled around Silvanus’s cage; Mrs. Holmes returns to her seat and looks at her son inquiringly. “I know Silvanus is well, Sherlock, or you wouldn’t be looking as tranquil as a china vase. You think something’s wrong about that boy, don’t you?” Her voice is pitched so that only Sherlock, and probably Silvanus, can hear her.

“Doesn’t that seem like a great deal of blood on the sister’s shirt, Mama? For a cat only being fallen on?” 

Anna gives the girl an assessing look. She’s clutching Mr. Tutwiler’s hand while he dials the clinic phone. The boy stands in the middle of the floor, his face empty as if waiting to be activated.

“What did he say to you, the boy?”

“That his cat was dying. And that he fell on the cat by accident.” 

Anna exhales sharply. “Oh, dear.”

Sherlock nods. 

“Pointing it out as a fact, rather than in the way of frantically excusing himself?”

Sherlock nods again.

The Holmeses consider together, two pale black-haired figures both with their lips pinned between their teeth. “I’m not sure there’s much we can do about it, darling,” Anna says eventually, reluctantly. “Most people will refuse even to entertain the idea that a child would intentionally kill an animal.”

“But —”

“I know. Let me think a moment.” 

At just this moment the children’s father bursts in through the clinic door while at the same time the other veterinarian, Mr. Wethers, comes out from the examining room with a consoling expression on his face. The girl takes one look at Mr. Wethers and flings herself into her father’s arms; the boy follows. It escapes neither Holmes that the brother’s movements echo his sister’s, but studiedly. “I’m so sorry,” Mr. Wethers begins.

Anna Holmes raises her eyebrows. “And, Sherlock, you see how badly he mimicked feeling, and how he didn’t seem distressed when talking with you? He hasn’t much skill, yet, in concealing what he is. … Enough, though, to fool at least some people” — as the father enfolds both children and rocks them, whispering, “Shhh, shhh, babies, you were so brave to rush here with Petunia when she was hurt. Shhhh.”

Mr. Tutwiler is still standing by the telephone, his arms folded, his gaze cast down. “He knows it’s all wrong, doesn’t he?” Sherlock whispers.

“I’ll just be a minute,” says Anna, and goes to Mr. Tutwiler. There is an exchange, inaudible to Sherlock. At the end of it Mr. Tutwiler is shaking his head, but as if in dismay, not as if to deny what he has heard. Then his hands open out in the gesture that means “Nothing will come of it.”

“It ought to be investigated, all the same.” Anna Holmes is now pitching her voice so that Sherlock — and, not incidentally, the boy — can hear her. “A necropsy …” Mr. Tutwiler nods once, yes, makes the hands-opening-out gesture again, goes into the examining room where the cat’s body must be. Anna returns to Sherlock.

“Well, you’ll have worked that out,” she tells him. “He’s good and skittish about it, though. I can’t promise you anything will be done; perhaps if Mr. Wethers is astute enough to suspect cruel treatment.” 

“But —”

“Sherlock, darling, I know. I promise you, I know.”

This adult resignation is abruptly too much for Sherlock. He clutches Silvanus’s cage to his chest and explodes: “He killed the cat, Mama! I know he did, I know it! And you know it too, or you wouldn’t have spoken to Mr. Tutwiler! There must be someone who can do something, there must be!”

The children’s father looses them and pivots toward the Holmeses; Anna has just time to feel relieved that Mr. Tutwiler has left the room (with any luck he won’t hear of the ruckus that’s about to happen, so they will continue to be able to avail themselves of his services) and to pull Sherlock and Silvanus close to her. 

“What, exactly, is the matter with you and this — this _child_ you’ve got with you?” the father hisses. “My kids’ cat is dead” — he turns to Sherlock now, and Anna Holmes rises up before him.

“That’s enough,” she says. “That’s enough. I’m very sorry about your cat, but you will not speak to my son in that manner.” Arm around Sherlock’s shoulders, she sweeps him and Silvanus out. 

He can feel her minute trembling; once they reach their car, he starts to cry. Sobbing, he sets Silvanus’s cage carefully on the backseat. Then he throws himself at his mother. “Everyone is lying, they’re all lying, all of you are pretending that everything’s all right and it’s not, it’s _not_ all right!” 

His mother embraces him and accepts his blows. Back when Anna Holmes was little Anna Vernet, she managed, painfully, to learn how to avoid being punished in exchange for offering up truths. Sherlock hasn’t, yet; he isn’t exactly guileless, but every lie he tells is a means to the end of ascertaining truth. Social lies, social turning aside of the gaze — Mycroft has managed these, but at a price; always quieter and less demonstrative than Sherlock, in his adolescence he has begun to assume a priggish and chilly mask. Anna Vernet Holmes wishes daily that her sons had taken after their father, with his laughing pleasure in the world, instead of after her.

After a time, Sherlock quiets. His mother strokes his hair. “But the man,” Sherlock says. “He knew I meant it was his son who killed the cat.”

“Mmhm, yes, he did.” Oh, Sherlock, still deducing in the middle of the storm: Anna can’t help but be proud. 

“So that was in his mind, too.”

“Yes, it must have been.”

“He’s pretending his son is—” Sherlock isn’t sure what word to use. “Normal” can’t be right; a person can be abnormal, like the people who live in the residence Papa runs, but still not think that killing a cat would be a lovely birthday present to himself. “Why is he pretending? If he pretends, he can’t … He can’t protect anyone. It’s. Unscientific.”

“ ‘Irrational’ is probably the word you want, dear. Its meaning is more broad; science isn’t the only area in which we can apply reason. —But yes, it is irrational. It’s a kind of wish, Sherlock. When people are frightened by a problem, they may ignore it and wish it would disappear. I suppose sometimes it does disappear, one way or another.”

Sherlock thinks this over. “I shan’t ever wish for anything, then, that’s all.”

Grief is a lance; Anna Holmes almost gasps with it, but manages to say, lightly, “Sweetest, I think you’ll find that was a wish, if you look at it closely.”

Sherlock produces an indignant sniff. The moment dissipates; Anna turns on the motor and drives them home.

*

Years later, it occurs to Sherlock to wonder whether the boy in the waiting room grew up into Jim Moriarty. He can no longer remember the boy’s face clearly … but no, no, the ages can’t be made to match; Jim is Mycroft’s senior by a year. No, it’s just that there’s more than one person in the world who rejoices in hurt. Sherlock knows that already, of course he does.

*  


> September 12, 1983
> 
> Dear Dr. Banerjee,
> 
> I am very sorry to report that Silvanus has died. I believe the cause was old age, as the average lifespan of a fancy rat ( _Rattus norvegicus_ sp) is two years, and as you know Silvanus was six months of age when you gave me him. In the past few months he had been sleeping more, but Mr. Tutwiler did not think he was sick, only old. 

[“Mama, this is meant to be a formal letter but I’ve got it wet. I shall have to write it out again.”

[“It’s all right, Sherlock. A close friend like Dr. Banerjee will appreciate your distress.”]

> Silvanus was an excellent research subject and I have documented many of my experiments with him.

[On the walls around Silvanus’s empty complex of tunnels, miniature shrubbery, and toys, with the plastic castle at its center: framed photos of Silvanus jumping through a hoop, navigating a maze, swinging from a little trapeze, perched on Sherlock’s hand, on Sherlock’s head, on Sherlock’s shoulder; in Anna Holmes’s wallet, a photo Sherlock would not allow his parents to hang, of himself smiling, nose to nose with Silvanus; on Robert Holmes’s desk at the sheltered residence, a slightly larger version of the same. On Sherlock’s nightstand, a notebook with pages of his notes: “Time to end of maze at trial 1: 34 sec. Time to end of maze at trial 2: 30 sec. Time to end of maze at trial 5: 12 sec. … Time to end of maze at trial 15: 45 sec.” {Addendum, dated several days later: “Dr. Banerjee hypothesizes that the test subject was satiated and no longer found the food reinforcing.” “Hypothesizes” and “satiated” are printed carefully, with more space between the letters than is typical of Sherlock’s hand: this is the trace left by Sarita Banerjee spelling out the words as Sherlock wrote them.}]

> I have preserved ~~Silv~~ the body in our freezer. 

[Silvanus is dead; the body is only a body.]

> I thought of bringing it to your laboratory for dissection. I have no violin lessons this week because Mr. Friedenberg is on holiday, so if you are free I could visit after school. Please let me know whether this would be convenient.
> 
> Very sincerely yours,
> 
> Sherlock Holmes

*

Anna Holmes picks up on the first ring.

Sarita Banerjee doesn’t pause to identify herself. “Oh, Anna.” 

“I know.”

“Do you think it’ll help?”

“He’s adamant in referring to Silvanus as a research subject; it would be funny if it weren’t heartbreaking. But yes, I think it would help; I believe that for Sherlock a close examination of tissue might serve the purpose a funeral would serve for another child. Don’t be surprised if he wants to keep slides.”

Sarita’s voice breaks a little when she laughs. “No, it’s exactly what I’d expect. All right, I’ll make arrangements with him for tomorrow, if that suits.”

“Thank you. And, Sarita — Silvanus was perhaps the best gift anyone has ever given him. You know what school is like for him; if rats can feel affection, Silvanus felt it for Sherlock, and it’s been. It’s been a help to him.”

There’s a brief silence. Odd, eager, passionate boy. Anna has already had to put a stop to his being trotted out as a show pony, as Sarita knows. “Give him a kiss for me, if he’ll take it.” 

*

On Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Sarita Banerjee and Mr. Sherlock Holmes dissect the body of a rat and prepare frozen sections. Sarita pretends not to notice when Sherlock’s eyes well up and he bites his lips, but she rests one hand on his shoulder while her other hand helps guide the scalpel down the midline, and while he removes the heart, the lungs, the kidneys and places them in the liquid nitrogen cooler and then slices them into neat 10-micron sections with the microtome and prepares slides. Mr. Holmes fetches a box of dermestid beetles from the skeletal preparator, who has coincidentally relocated for the day to an empty office just two doors down the hall from Dr. Banerjee’s lab and who occupies Mr. Holmes with paperwork for fifteen solid minutes; in Mr. Holmes’s absence, Dr. Banerjee sets the skull in a tiny vise and opens it with a dental surgical saw and forceps to extract the brain, which she and Mr. Holmes then section and examine together. They then remove the skin from the body of the rat and place the body in the box for the dermestids to clean. 

Finally Sarita sits down with Sherlock in her lap, his wet face pressed against her neck, and they speak of nothing until Anna returns from her errands to fetch the child.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not in the slightest exaggerating the range of [what it's possible to teach a rat.](http://stalecheerios.com/clicker-training-pet-rats/)
> 
> [Here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2gBVKGSjcs&NR=1&feature=fvwp) is a time-lapse video of dermestids cleaning the body of a mouse.


	4. Not even if I kiss their photographs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock observes that his mother has been keeping within two rooms of the telephone whenever she’s at home, and that she checks the answerphone and the charge on the portable telephone’s handset several times daily. Sherlock observes that this frightens him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Dorianne Laux's beautiful poem ["Lapse"](http://plumepoetry.com/2014/06/lapse/).

Anna Holmes has always had a good digestion. Over the winter of 1986-1987, though, she finds herself bloated and flatulent. Well, it’s a season of rich foods, and it’s inevitable, she supposes, that in middle age her guts should find the cakes and wassail more of a challenge than they did when she was thirty.

In January, she finds that her favorite trousers have grown tight. And, God, she’s tired. A day of teaching leaves her wrung out and barely interested in supper. She snaps at Robert when his hand curves around her breast in bed one Friday night late that month and then she sits up straight, hands steepled to her mouth. “How long has it been?” she asks him. Her voice shakes. Sweat has broken out on her lower back.

“Before Christmas. It was before Christmas,” Robert says, and the disappointed, slightly irritated expression he wore a moment ago has vanished. Wife and husband look at each other for a long moment.

“Rob — ”

He holds out his arms and she subsides into them. Robert runs his hands over Anna’s back, up and down, circle and around, up and down. This has always worked like a drug on Anna’s insomnia and it doesn’t fail her now. But Robert lies awake all night, waiting for dawn.

*

Sherlock doesn’t just see; he observes. He observes that for the past week and a half Robert has been preoccupied and that his temper is short. He observes that since Monday, Anna has been keeping within two rooms of the telephone whenever she’s at home, and that she checks the answerphone and the charge on the portable telephone’s handset several times daily. Sherlock observes that this frightens him.

But, on the other hand, Mycroft hasn’t appeared.

Therefore, something is probably gravely wrong, but “probably” has not yet hardened to “certainly.” On Thursday, Sherlock readies himself for school, thoughtful. He presents himself to say goodbye to his mother and finds her massaging her temples over the _Guardian_ crossword, with just three answers filled in. What comes out of his mouth then isn’t “Goodbye, Mama,” but instead: “You and Papa aren’t getting a divorce.” There’s a curious heavy sensation at the side of his head, like a prompting to look at something there, but he can’t force himself to turn toward it; his gaze swivels away when he tries.

Anna sighs and straightens her back. “Sit down, darling. I’ll phone the school and let them know you’ll be late.” She doesn’t insult Sherlock by making the call out of earshot, but “No, it’s a family matter … This afternoon or tomorrow” tells him nothing he doesn’t already know. With the call out of the way, she kisses the top of Sherlock’s head and resumes her seat. Sherlock’s eyes are wide, his face set; he looks, Anna realizes, much as he did in the Nairobi hospital, when the leg spasms struck.

“I am very sorry, Sherlock. Your father and I had hoped to delay until we either had something definite to tell you and Mycroft, or knew there was nothing to tell. Obviously that has proven foolish and unfair. The great likelihood, as you have surmised, is that I am very ill.”

And yes, that’s it, that’s exactly it, the thing Sherlock knew was there but could not bring himself to turn and see. “You’re waiting for test results,” he says, in quite a neutral tone he is pleased to hear, only it is undercut by the fact that he must have got up without noticing, because his mother’s coffee mug lies in shards at the far end of the kitchen and he is standing before her with his arm still extended. “You can’t be sick,” he says, “you can’t,” and Anna hears him, in the veterinarian’s office so long ago ( _the past is another country_ ), saying “Then I’ll never wish for anything again.” She might have described the ensuing sensation as one of rending, except that it’s worse: it’s the sensation of watching her child be rent.

“Mycroft doesn’t know,” Sherlock continues.

“It’s rather easier to conceal anxiety by letter.” Anna wipes Sherlock’s face, kisses him again, and sweeps up the broken mug before she goes on. “I’m not happy about asking you to keep a secret from your brother, Sherlock. But if indeed there’s something wrong, your father and I want to tell Mycroft in person, not over the phone. Can you manage to keep mum for a bit? We expect to hear from the oncologist at any moment, and then we’ll go and be with Mycroft at once.”

Sherlock takes in the unspoken assumption here, and nods. Keeping mum will be like having a cyst, only in his mind. He can do that.

Anna thinks: _It’s too much to ask._ But then, she fears life is going to entail quite a lot of “too much to ask,” quite soon.

*

“This is all too typical of the disease, I’m afraid.” The oncologist stands in front of the light box in his consulting room, pointing. _Here. Here. Here_. Metastases to the spleen, to the liver, to the stomach. Almost certainly to the peritoneum as well. _The,_ thinks Robert. No, _Anna’s_ peritoneum, _Anna’s_ spleen, _Anna’s_ liver, _Anna_ ’s stomach. “Ovarian cancer,” the oncologist continues, “is often diagnosed only at a late stage. The symptoms are vague and we have no good screening tests. Mrs. Holmes, Mr. Holmes, I am very sorry.”

*

There is a debulking surgery: removal, for comfort’s sake and to slow the disease a little, of the masses of tumor that fill Anna’s pelvis and belly. “The next step is to fillet me, and then you can make supper,” she jokes. Robert doesn’t smile. She does feel better after she recovers from the surgery, but six months later a persistent ache sets in to her lower back where new growth is pressing against the nerves.

* 

In September, Sherlock comes home from school with a bruised cheekbone. He doesn’t spend the afternoon with Robert at the sheltered residence nowadays. He carefully puts away his torn jacket before going into Anna’s room; the attendant leaves when he enters. “I fell during games,” he lies. Anna’s breathing heavily, so he brings her her oxycodone and sits beside the bed reading _The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees_ until she drifts into sleep. After that he goes into his own room, tears out several more pages of the _Manual of Therapy for Ovarian Cancer_ he stole from the oncologist’s office, and burns them in a Pyrex bowl on his desk, opening a window to air out the stink of char.

* 

“You’ll take the greatest care of them,” Anna says in a lucid moment, smiling at Robert. “Yes,” Robert replies, automatically, thinking: _But who will take the greatest care of me, Anna? When you’re gone, who will take care of me?_

* 

Sherlock has worked out how to pick the lock on the hospice’s analgesic stores to ensure that he can top up Anna’s dosage in case the staff is ever insufficiently prompt; he shows Mycroft the technique, and during the October of Anna’s last weeks they trade off twelve-hour shifts so one of them is always watching her. Sarita Banerjee flies in from New York and Sherlock is dimly glad to see her, but by the time Anna finally dies he is too weary to feel anything. Mycroft’s in the same state. They both sleep around the clock and when Sherlock wakes he seems to be entirely dry, inside. He drinks about a liter of water from the kitchen tap and then finds Dr. Banerjee and trails her from room to room, saying nothing. When she goes to the toilet he tries to follow her in. “Sherlock, I simply cannot defecate with any person watching me,” she says, gently, and sits him on the floor outside the loo where he obediently remains until he hears the water running for her to wash her hands and then he stands up and waits, his hands pressed together in front of his mouth, until she emerges. Perhaps Mycroft is still sleeping.

*  


One afternoon a week after the cremation, forty or fifty people come to the Holmeses’ house for, according to the newspaper announcement, A Gathering to Celebrate the Life of Anna Holmes. Mycroft and Sherlock are obliged to stand in a sort of receiving line, apparently, as person after person who cannot have the faintest notion of what it is like to have Anna Holmes removed from one’s life manfully pats their shoulders or womanfully embraces them. “You can’t bear it anymore,” Mycroft whispers to Sherlock between encroachments. “You poor dear, you’ve lost your mother. Burst into tears _immediately._ ” At once, Sherlock convulses and throws his arms around his brother, making strangled sounds which are the more realistic because he is grinding Mycroft’s suit jacket between his teeth. “Oh, Sherlock,” Mycroft says in broken tones and, to the stranger advancing on them, “I’m so sorry, we must go, my little brother —” and together the brothers stumble out into the relative quiet of the hallway, where Mycroft lets go. “Everyone is an _idiot,_ ” Sherlock hisses.

“There really was no need to chew my jacket.” Mycroft smooths the wet wool, picking irritably at a fleck of something repulsive that must have come from between Sherlock’s teeth.

“Her library,” Sherlock offers.

The library has a couch where Anna used to like to stretch out her legs while she read. When Sarita Banerjee goes in search of the brothers an hour later she finds them on it, neither sleeping nor reading nor talking nor weeping, but only sitting. “Come and take a walk with me,” she orders, and, to Mycroft: “ _Both_ of you. We’ll come back after the memorial hordes have gone.” She has brought their coats with her, Sherlock’s inexpertly mended. He curls his lip at the stitching; she returns him an eye-roll. “I am a biochemist, Mr. Holmes, and my garment-repair skills are precisely nil. We can take it to be fixed properly next week, but for now you’ve got to wear it and you know perfectly well that is the best that I could do. How long ago was it ripped, anyway?”

“September. You should be able to approximate by how much the loose threads around the tear have frayed, look — ”

How easily Dr. Banerjee sets Sherlock onto the ground where he feels safest. Out of the depths of Mycroft’s grief, purest envy flashes and is immediately suppressed.

They walk and walk, until Sherlock is stumbling. “How much is your father drinking?” Sarita asks Mycroft, quietly.

“He’s been getting drunk most days, since. Since our mother died.”

“Never before noon,” Sherlock puts in, sleepy-voiced. “He has a _rule_ about that. But he starts hovering over the drinks cabinet as soon as he’s had breakfast. Sometimes he touches the doors.”

“For God’s _sake_!”

Both Holmeses turn to Dr. Banerjee, startled. She flaps the hand that isn’t holding Sherlock’s. “Don’t be such nitwits, you can’t possibly imagine that was directed at either of you. I’ll have a talk with him.”

Mycroft makes a face.

“You’re right, it probably won’t help, but there you see my toolkit in its entirety.” They go the rest of the way to the house in silence.

When he’s sure that Dr. Banerjee is asleep, Sherlock drags a mess of bedding to the floor of her room. In the morning she very nearly steps on him.

 


	5. Incubus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing’s easier than to feed the hungry, supposing you have the right food for the species.  
> 1990-1991.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Explicit descriptions of sexual abuse in this chapter.

If Mycroft has a type, Jim isn’t exactly it: small, quick in his gestures, prone to giggling. Mycroft has always spent more time looking at big, languid men. But, _God,_ Jim is brilliant — brilliantly clever, amusing, changeable. What is it Mycroft once heard an American say about the San Francisco weather? If you don't like it, just wait an hour. Jim is easily irritated — say Mycroft is late meeting him after a tutorial, Jim will snap a greeting and give pointedly brief replies to Mycroft's more and more urgent inquiries about his work on his thesis, how the day's conference with his adviser went, whether Jim might like to get supper together. But ten minutes later it's all done; Jim's face will transform itself, taking on that bright intense gaze Mycroft has never seen turned toward anyone but him. He drops in on Mycroft at all hours, smiling, sure of his welcome. He is welcome. He never wants Mycroft to help him with his work, or to lend him money, or — or anything. He seems to want only Mycroft’s company. He laughs at Mycroft’s jokes. Since their mother died, only Sherlock has laughed at Mycroft’s jokes.

Mycroft considers himself in the mirror. His nose is long and pointed, his hair already receding, his shoulders narrow. Could he arouse desire in anyone? Jim’s friendship should be enough to be going on with. It should sustain him. Mycroft straightens his spine and essays a sidelong look. God, no, that’ll never work. What can it be like, to feel a warm hand against his cheek? What if he knelt at Jim’s feet and pressed his open mouth to the front of Jim’s trousers? Mycroft cups himself. His genitals are just at the level of the sink’s lip, where the mirror can’t see. Mycroft closes his eyes and imagines that his hand is his mouth, that his pajama fronts are Jim’s snug trousers; he hardens under himself. Bright heat draws inward along his hipbones, toward his balls: this is what Jim would feel, this is what Mycroft’s mouth would feel. What his mouth could make Jim feel. Mycroft gasps. His pajamas and belly are wet and there are tears in the corners of his eyes. What happens afterward — how do people look at each other and go on having conversations? He imagines cleaning himself with a wet flannel. Would Jim allow him to clean Jim’s cock and belly, as well as his own?

There’s a flurry of knocking and then Jim’s voice in Mycroft’s lounge. “Hello, Mr. Mycroft Holmes!” 

“Jim!” Mycroft manages, looking in dismay at his sticky hand.

“No hurry, dearest. I’ll make myself at home.”

Mycroft has got not a stitch of clothing in the bathroom except for the sodden pajamas he’s wearing. Hurriedly he strips out of them, rolls them into a tight cylinder, and stuffs them into the bottom of the hamper; then he washes off between waist and knees and stares, breathing hard, at his bath towel. People do this: they step out of the bathroom seductively, with a towel wrapped around the waist, just so for the pulling off. He can do it. He takes a steady breath, drops his shoulders to relax them, and steps out to let Jim Moriarty get an eyeful of Mycroft Holmes wearing nothing but a bath towel wrapped around the waist. Sweat, of course, collects immediately at the small of his back.

Jim is lounging on Mycroft’s bed -- in precisely the pose of the Rokeby Venus, Mycroft notes, except that he has clothes on. At Mycroft’s approach, he turns around and smiles. “You must be half frozen. Where’s your dressing gown? Now come and sit by me.”

Covered again, Mycroft sits, wretched with desire.

*

Sherlock visits at the next weekend. “You haven’t spoken with our father,” he says, not looking directly at Mycroft, his face still. 

“What purpose would it serve? You’ve gotten in the habit of stating the obvious, Little Brother.” Sherlock rolls his eyes and presses his lips together. Ah, so his facial muscles remain capable of motion. He’s so tall, and he sticks out in every direction. 

“He’s never” — and now Sherlock does look straight at his brother — “he’s never going to stop drinking.” That would have been a question, if Sherlock permitted himself any hope, but Mycroft’s little brother is no fool. “No, he’s not,” Mycroft replies. 

“Wasn’t asking.” Though of course he wanted to be asking, not stating. Sherlock’s false bright smile isn’t new anymore. 

Mycroft would like to take his hand, as Sherlock used to take Mycroft’s hand, for comfort. “If I still lived at home — ”

“It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t hit me or throw things, just sits in the lounge drinking and whingeing about how I remind him of our mother. If I ask for money, he gives me money, or if he’s too drunk and I need money, I take it. Anyway. Dr. Banerjee has said I may visit her next summer, if he agrees.”

“He’ll agree.” 

Sherlock nods. There’s a flare of sadness. “You had _so much more time_ with her, Mycroft!” 

Mycroft twigs. “You’re beginning to forget her.”

“ _No._ Not forget her.” Neither brother speaks for a moment. “Only, I watch the videos we made and it’s — What’s in the video, it sometimes replaces what I actually remember.” 

“Looking at memories changes them. If we had no videos, your memories of our mother would still change.” 

“Yes, use simple words for me, Mycroft. I’m just Little Brother, after all.” 

“I’m not sure it’s me you’re angry at, Sherlock.”

Sherlock tightens his mouth and presses his chin inward. The sensation of looking at their mother is so strong that Mycroft has to close his eyes. Jim’ll be here any moment … 

There’s his knock; Mycroft is almost, almost annoyed. He doesn’t know how properly to care for Sherlock, who seems angrier and more brittle every month in the two years since Anna’s death; visits with Mycroft slide fast into sarcasm and one-upmanship. Mycroft keeps a certificate Sherlock made, at six, recording on stiff paper with many carefully drawn curlicues the achievements of his rat Silvanus. At least Sherlock still has his brother and Dr. Banerjee — there’s that. And he, Mycroft, has Jim. Mycroft turns, smiling, toward the door as it opens.

*

Oh. _Oh._ This has been worth waiting for. The boy, Sherlock (and there’s a name well fit for purring), hasn’t turned but instead watches Jim in the mirror over Mycroft’s dining table. He’s a flowering branch; set him among plum blossoms and his beauty would scorch them. His skin is incandescent, his hair a dark tumble — oh, yes it would be well worth fucking pasty Mycroft en route to a chance to turn these tilted, sharp eyes wild. Long legs hooked over Jim’s shoulders. The spindly twelve-year-old in the photo on Mycroft’s wall had given promise of future loveliness; “When was that taken?” Jim had asked idly, seeing it months ago, feeling the first prick of _Give me that._ The live boy in the mirror glances away. For once, Jim accepts Mycroft’s kiss on the cheek with real warmth.

“Sherlock, this is my friend—”

“—Mr. Moriarty. Thank you, Mycroft, I had worked that out.” Sherlock nods at Jim.

Smiling, Jim shakes Sherlock’s hand. Pointless adolescent snarking, check. _You want so much to be a grownup, you delicious thing._ And the voice! In a few years, when his chest has filled out to resonance, that voice will be _fatal._ “It’s Jim, please. I’m quite honored to meet Mycroft’s brother.” _Platitude._ Perhaps a mistake: the boy rolls his eyes — but no, no, it’s all right, he’s flattered and doesn’t like to admit it. Mycroft is pleased, too, tucking his chin as if that will conceal his smile. Christ, this is going to be a lot of work. “I thought, for the occasion, I might stand you both dinner.”

And it isn’t that much work, after all. A little sympathy with how terribly, terribly, achingly, agonizingly bored, bored, bored Sherlock is with the science and mathematics curriculum at his public school, a little drawing-out on the subject of his absurd experiments on how temperature and humidity affect rates of fungal reproduction in soil samples taken from various locations around Hampstead Heath, and Jim finds himself — _spontaneously!_ “This occurs to me on the spur of the moment!” — suggesting that Sherlock and he spend Friday afternoon together, looking into mathematical models of growth and decay in unicellular organisms that live colonially. It could make a fascinating project, if they keep at it may even result in publishable data! Then, after Sherlock and Jim have been at work, the three of them can have dinner again. It’s a plan! 

The looks on those Holmes faces are enough to get a fellow _drunk._ Sherlock will restrain himself from bouncing in his seat if it kills him, but he can’t stop biting his lips with excitement ("I could do that for you," Jim doesn’t say), while Mycroft is all fraternal pride, to say nothing of his delusion that Brother Sherlock will make Brother Pasty more appealing to Jim. (Yes, Jim concedes, he will have to encourage Mycroft to send Sherlock ahead into the flat, then allow Pasty a bit of a grope before they say goodnight. All in a day’s work!)

(But if only Brother Pasty’s tongue weren’t quite so graceless.)

*

Sometimes, Sherlock imagines that his classmates must be able to smell what he is. He has schooled his face to impassivity and he carefully imitates the indifference with which boys look at other boys. He has closely observed, the better to avoid, the way girls touch their hair. When he crosses his legs, it’s always ankle over knee. His uniform is no different to the other boys’ uniforms. He has never spoken fatal words such as “I fancy you” or “One look at Wilkes’s bottom and I’ve got a stiffie.” His voice has broken to a baritone and he is dead certain he speaks with no sort of a lilt. So what is it that leads Stephen Jacks unerringly to whisper “Poofter” in Sherlock’s ear? How do the rugby players in their abbreviated shorts know that when Sherlock passes, the arrow “Oooh, here comes Holmes! Everybody bend over!” will hit its mark?

But it’s worse, it’s worse than that. It’s not only that Sherlock wants, not only that he wants men, not only that he lives in a fever he can diminish only with exhaustion; not only that even the sternest focus on his work leaves him thrumming under his clothes; not only that sometimes simply wrapping a towel around himself after he bathes makes him gasp with longing for the press of skin against his. 

It doesn’t matter about wanting men; only idiots and priests could give a damn about that. Being queer is not Sherlock’s problem. This is Sherlock’s problem: He doesn’t only long for the press of skin, and his imagination is vivid.

_A man holds Sherlock’s wrists above his head with one hand and forces his thighs apart. The man bends his head to nip at Sherlock’s belly, pushing aside his cock to reach the delicate skin just above the root; he pulls at Sherlock’s foreskin and pinches it together over the head, then runs his tongue along the seam he has made —_

_A man binds Sherlock’s wrists, then binds his ankles, then draws ankles and wrists together till Sherlock is bundled like a dumpling. With his thumb — no. With a painter’s fine brush, he teases at Sherlock’s perineum, at the opening — Sherlock whimpers —_

Sherlock comes, furious with himself: Why should one word, “opening,” have that effect on him? Why can’t he think “anus” and be done with it? This power —

_Sherlock’s buttocks are raised, supported by a stack of pillows. From behind him a man caresses them, cups them, strokes the crease between buttock and thigh, kisses the back of Sherlock’s neck. Sherlock bucks — “No, my beauty,” the man says softly, tenderly, “keep still. It’s up to me when you come”; but Sherlock can’t help it, he bucks into the pillow again, and the man bites at the spot he kissed before, then kisses it again, and slaps Sherlock hard, once, twice, on the soft downcurve of his arse —_

Sherlock’s always in a fever, and in his fever dreams he’s always yielding, always taken, always baring his throat, opening his legs, begging _Oh please, oh please_ and _Please, please make it hurt_ and _Yes I belong to you, yes, use me, oh fuck me —_

Every day, all day, he protects himself from idiots and bullies, he reminds himself that he’s above them. No matter how often Stephen Jacks whispers “Poofter,” Sherlock doesn’t flinch. When he masturbates he forces himself to imagine commanding and not begging, taking and not giving, but it’s no good, he gets hard but he can never reach that inner surging, and the instant he stops working at it, the vision alters — so he’s on top, but with his hands bound behind his back and the other’s hands moving him up and down at will, Sherlock helpless, helpless —

He can’t. He cannot afford this weakness. To belong to some clumsy, _stupid_ predator —

*

Nothing’s easier than to feed the hungry, supposing you have the right food for the species. Tidbits first, to whet the subject’s appetite and accustom him to looking in the desired location:

“Oh, that’s well spotted.” Spoken seriously, in response to Sherlock’s finding a flaw in the design of a study.

“You do have a good eye at the microscope. I admit it, I didn’t notice those spores.” Which he placed in the specimen for Sherlock to find. 

He lets Sherlock catch him gazing in admiration. How quickly, how modestly the beauty looks down, color high, lips just parting.

There’s no hurry, Jim reminds himself, resting his hand on his chin to signify to Sherlock, should the boy glance his way, that he, Jim, is thoughtful. And it turns out there’s not only no hurry, there’s no need to remind himself there’s no hurry, because Sherlock unfurls at speed; the composed and formal look of that first greeting in Mycroft’s flat has given way, by the third Friday of research into _mathematical models of growth and decay,_ to glad, tentative smiles. 

Conveniently, it’s a chill evening, and Mycroft’s meeting them at a bistro a few streets over, so:

“Here, I don’t think your coat’s fallen quite right,” Jim says. He pinches up the shoulders, brushes along the arms, oh-I-was-about-to-run-my-hand-down-the-lapels-but-I’ve-just-caught-myself, glances up, well-that’s-embarrassing-terribly-sorry, into Sherlock’s face, hand arrested an inch from the fine wool, and oh! _Let bells ring out,_ for there it is, the pupils just slightly dilated, the intake of breath forced steady though it wants to be quick.

Jim steps back, flustered and shy. “Well!” he says, clearing his throat. “That’s you looking natty. We’d better hurry. Mycroft always gets a bit haughty when someone’s late.”

“Does he really?” Has Sherlock already collected himself? Jim has a flare of an image: four fingers shoved deep into that pretty mouth, tears in those sky-colored eyes, the boy’s trousers and pants shoved down. His hard cock straight up. _See how quick you pull yourself together then._

Jim nearly snarls, though, at sight of Mycroft. The unendurable dinner conversation, the _history_ and the _diplomacy_ and the _shifting balance of power,_ all interspersed with fond looks at Jim, and _how is it possible_ that this bureaucrat, who must have been middle-aged when he was twelve, is in any way related to the fey lovely whose legs Jim will be spreading before the month is out?

So that was Week Three. Week Four is Perfectly Proper Jim Week. Perfectly Proper Jim doesn’t appear to notice the sidelong looks Sherlock gives him, or the fact that he’s left open the top two buttons of his shirt, resolutely closed to the neck before this day.

On Week Five, Sherlock’s shirt is closed up tight again: he’s Perfectly Proper Sherlock, and somewhat embarrassed about Week Four. So it’s off to the races! Jim rests a hand lightly under the curls on Sherlock’s nape as they look over computations together. Jim circles a thumb experimentally. Jim bends close as he points out an interesting result. 

And, talking of interesting results, what can that be in Sherlock’s lap? “That does look uncomfortable,” Jim says softly. The _blush_ on this boy. “Come on now, we’re both adults here. Men get erections. Oh, well!” He makes a mocking little face. It really is funny, though, to watch Sherlock take in the information: _A man of the world is insouciant_ — as if on a study card. And — this is a bit of a gamble, but with good odds; Jim doubts Sherlock will be discussing his inappropriate erections with Brother Pasty — “It’s not easy to concentrate when you’re all pent up, is it? Oh, go on, open your trousers. I won’t be offended. _Me?_ Please. Besides, you don’t want to stain the fabric.

“See, your pants are already wet. Here’s a tissue, right here. Wipe off the tip, there you go — no, leave it out, it’s still leaking.

“You’ve a lovely cock, really.” Massaging Sherlock’s shoulders now. “You must have masses of girlfriends, just masses, what with your hair and your eyes and, well.” A fond chuckle, just here? Yes.

“Boyfriends, then? No? You can’t still be — Really! You do surprise me, Sherlock.” The boy hasn’t said a word in all this, just nodded, trembled, unzipped, dabbed. He’s clutching the tissue still. Finally he twists in the chair, up, flings himself at Jim’s mouth to kiss it, and Jim barely has time to get a grip on his cock firm enough to stop him coming. “Wouldn’t you like me to do this for you?”

“God, yes, please, Jim, please” — that little _tart,_ whining for it. _I can make you beg so much harder than that._ Jim yanks Sherlock’s chair around and away from the worktable, the legs screeching against the floor, drops to his knees between Sherlock’s thighs, looks up at Sherlock through his lashes and stretches out his tongue to just … barely … lick at the tip of his cock, still squeezing hard at the base, cups Sherlock’s balls and rolls them in his hand, the boy’s eyes pressed tight shut, every breath a cry, _huh huh huh huh_ at a pitch he must have thought he’d left behind when his voice broke, and all at once Jim takes Sherlock’s whole cock right down his throat and releases the ring he’s made around the base and squeezes his balls and the boy wails like a cat being fucked in the back corner of your garden on a hot night and Jim sucks him dry and wipes him down and shoves him back into his clothes.

_You’re a brainy little boy, but you look dumb as an ox right now. Oh yes you do._

*

After that, everything happens. Every Friday, Sherlock goes to Jim’s flat to study mathematical models of growth and decay, and as soon as he walks in the door everything he knows about research flies out of his head. Jim says, “Hello, sexy.” Jim’s look elicits an emotional sensation, and emotion is physiology: hormones, neurotransmitters, heart rate, blood pressure. How, though, how, does Jim’s gaze, which does not make physical contact, create a physical effect? This problem fixes Sherlock to the spot. When Jim rubs his thumb across Sherlock’s mouth, Sherlock’s penis hardens, his testicles feel heavy, he opens his mouth without conscious volition just as he might open it to water when thirsty. 

Something is bearing down on Sherlock. Whenever it isn’t happening he thinks about it. It comes from Jim. Sherlock can’t so much as look at Jim’s hands without moving toward them, placing them on himself, opening his legs. He grows thick and bright where Jim touches him, and then he disappears from himself. There’s no Sherlock and no not-Sherlock. Every time it’s the same: How many minutes go by. Hours. Sherlock can't tell. At Jim’s mouth wet on Sherlock’s throat, afterward, Sherlock bucks away, full of loathing. Jim smiles. Sherlock comes into his own hand on Friday night when he gets home, on Saturday night, on Sunday night, thinking about how Jim ran his fingers up the insides of Sherlock's thighs. He forces himself to sleep in his drying come. Loathsome, loathsome.

The next Friday he puts himself into Jim's hands again. 

Weeks go by. Months pass like this. Sherlock hikes his rump into the air and holds himself open while Jim fucks him. Sherlock comes just from being fucked, Jim doesn’t have to touch him; “What a little slut you are,” Jim says, and Sherlock can’t tell whether he’s hearing contempt or encouragement or both or something else entirely. Sherlock stands next to Jim’s chair with his trousers and pants shoved down around his knees while Jim reads. “Hands behind your back, sexy.” Occasionally Jim runs a finger up and down the underside of Sherlock’s penis. If Sherlock comes, Jim will shove a wad of loo roll into his pants to soak up the mess and zip him up and make him stay like that, with the wet cold paper sticking to his penis and testicles. 

Or sometimes Jim sits Sherlock, naked, on his clothed lap, and makes Sherlock narrate what he’s doing. What they’re doing.

After Jim’s and Sherlock’s _researches,_ they all go out to dinner, he, Jim, Mycroft, and Mycroft has had a promotion at the Home Office already and can’t talk about the intelligence reports he’s now allowed to read, and Mycroft is smiling over a plate of ravioli with wild mushrooms and then the figs with mascarpone, and he buys dinner for all three of them and after dinner Sherlock goes home on the tube to Robert, who has sometimes passed out in the room that used to be Anna’s library and that Sherlock now, privately, calls the Drunk Tank, and Mycroft and Jim walk down the road together after seeing Sherlock to the tube station and then … Sherlock doesn’t know. His mind blanks out. _I’m sleeping with my brother’s boyfriend._ On nights when Robert has passed out Sherlock steals half a dozen cigarettes and smokes them all, one after another, on the back steps, feeling his lungs protest, _you fucking worm._

*

One Friday night at their usual restaurant, Sherlock flinches from Jim’s touch when Jim asks him to pass the salt. Mycroft looks up, frowns. Sherlock composes himself. Mycroft takes up another bite of gnocchi with pesto. 

Perhaps it’s easier, after all, to know that you really are alone.

*

When it ends, it ends suddenly; Sherlock himself is surprised to awaken that morning already having decided. He goes to Jim’s flat as usual after school but when Jim opens the door Sherlock slips past without touching him and when Jim, an eyebrow raised, approaches Sherlock, Sherlock says, “No. You’ve had all you’re getting,” which isn’t what he thought he was going to say. He had a speech framed, _all formal and dignified,_ according to the mocking voice in his head, but this is what emerges instead. All right, it’ll do. He stares Jim down as long as he can, which isn’t very long; when he looks at the floor, Jim reaches for him again. _“I said I’m done.”_ Apparently he can manage the unyielding bit as long as he doesn’t look Jim in the eye. That’s all right, as well. “I’ll meet you and Mycroft at the restaurant,” Sherlock hears himself say. Then he sees himself walk to the door, turn the handle, and walk out. Though not before, smiling, Jim passes his hand lightly, swiftly, over Sherlock’s trousers where they cover his genitals.

Sherlock walks and walks until it is time to meet for dinner, then for ten minutes more, to be sure of arriving at the restaurant after Mycroft and Jim are already seated. He looks at neither of them until he is speaking, and then he stares directly into Mycroft’s face. “Hello, Mycroft. Mr. Moriarty and I are done with our researches. You can ask him about the results.” 

Riding the tube after that, he almost falls asleep. Two years have passed since he was last so tired. Mycroft rings later, and then comes by, and then rings again and again and again, for weeks, but Sherlock won’t talk to him or return the calls, and eventually they cease.

*

Jim’s doctoral thesis is due in mid-June. Sherlock is well familiar with the subject matter, of course: _mathematical models of growth and decay_ … Also, he has kept up his lockpicking skills since the days when it was important to maintain access to analgesic stores. It’s not hard to pick Jim’s advisor’s office lock, or to make a duplicate of the floppy disk that holds Jim’s thesis. Because Sherlock is not Jim’s equal in mathematical sophistication, working out where to delete one section and insert a similar but not identical passage is less easy; it costs him three sleepless nights. He’s not entirely satisfied with the result, but if he delays too long then the advisor may find time at least to skim the original and may recognize, when he gives the thesis a more thorough reading later, that the material has mysteriously changed.

The second break-in is much more time-consuming and noisier than the first. Pick the office lock. Delete the original thesis from the floppy disk. Copy the amended version onto the disk. Print out the amended version while leafing through the original’s printout in case the advisor has made marginal notes that Sherlock will then have to forge onto the new version. Breathe a sigh of relief that this isn’t the case: Sherlock hasn’t done anything systematic to develop his forgery skills. Put the amended version into the original’s binding. Bundle up the original. Walk out, locking the office behind himself. Go home.

A week later, Jim’s advisor rings him. An urgent meeting, please. There’s a question concerning certain passages in his thesis, passages that appear to reproduce without credit material from a paper previously published in _Acta Mathematica Leipzig_. Can Mr. Moriarty explain?

Well, yes, Mr. Moriarty _can_ explain, but the information that his thesis has been altered by the pretty-boy tart who gave him the boot earlier that spring is unlikely to be well received. And even Jim can’t come up with a better story on the spot. He shakes his head — academic pressure, exhaustion, a lapse in judgment, deep sense of shame — and that’s the end of the prospective James Moriarty, Ph.D.

*

Sherlock’s flight lands at JFK at 3:45 in the afternoon of July 15. He’s almost the last person off the plane, and Sarita Banerjee has to take a moment to match the tall and model-gawky figure with the Sherlock she remembers. Apart from the sudden height, his physical aspect hasn’t changed so much — the bone structure, the tilted eyes, the unusual coloring are fixed marks through childhood and adolescent tectonic shifts — but his demeanor is another matter. The face that was so lively and inquisitive is, for the few moments it takes him to spot her in the crowd at the arrival gate, entirely closed; he moves with a too-meticulous grace, like an animal concealing an injury. “Sherlock!” she calls at the same instant when he sees her, and the emotion that chases relief across his face is — is that _fear?_

She shows the airline escort her ID and signs the paperwork for Unaccompanied Minors Traveling Internationally. “Really, there ought to be something far more comprehensive for Unaccompanied Sherlocks”: This earns her a smile, at least, as does “You’re merciful today, Sherlock; I am well aware that wasn’t actually funny.” But all the way home his behavior worries her more and more. In the cab he sits as close as he can press himself, but when she reaches across his shoulders he shifts his upper body away till she takes her arm back in puzzlement. Twice she sees that he’s near tears, but he turns and stares out the window till he has forced them back.

“Does seeing me remind you of your mother’s death?” Sarita hazards, after a dinner that Sherlock mostly pushes around with his fork. 

“What? … No.” He doesn’t look at Sarita. And when was Sherlock ever monosyllabic?

“Sherlock, I’ve known you since you were three. I know when something’s badly amiss, even if I can’t discern what it is.”

 _“Stop!”_ A cry of such misery that neither of them can speak at first. Then: “Dr. Banerjee, please. I’m sorry. Just — ”

“All right, consider me warned off. Only, is it anything Mycroft can help with, if I can’t?”

Sherlock emits the ugliest laugh Sarita ever hopes to hear from him, and will say nothing more.

Yet the visit goes well, after that — Sherlock relaxes, bit by bit, and if he seems oddly wary around those postdocs she introduces him to who are not only good-looking but also male, perhaps that’s natural for a boy discovering he’s gay. (Sarita congratulates herself on having figured this out about Sherlock several years ago — it’s not often even she is ahead of him on any score at all.) Certainly he’s as absorbable as he ever was in any discussion of (depending on what department she’s brought him round to) insect behavior, the by-products of decomposition, or the differences in soil ecosystems of estuarine, palustrine, and lacustrine environments. But he doesn’t mention any friends. He doesn’t mention Mycroft. He doesn’t mention that research project he was working on with Mycroft’s boyfriend what’s-his-name. In their letters to each other, she and Sherlock have always expressed affection and intimacy in the form of shared intellectual inquiry, but it’s another thing to spend two weeks with him and hear not a single word about a social life. 

Two nights before he’s scheduled to leave, knowledge kicks Sarita awake, so hard she needs a minute to find her feet. Up, she goes to the bathroom, counts to ten, then rinses out her mouth, looks into the sink, and mutters, “Sodding _Christ_.”

Sherlock is folded in the armchair in her living room, arms wrapped around his legs, forehead on his knees. “Dearest heart,” she says, unable to say anything else, and without lifting his head he shakes it No. Sarita stands for a good while, looking at him. Even when he was a tiny child, Sherlock was ferocious in his autonomy; she doesn’t believe he’ll allow her to breach it now. At last she says that, in so many words, and there’s the tiny nod she has seen him give before, when he’s prepared to hear what comes next but it had better be good. 

“Is it still going on?” 

He shakes his head. 

“No police?”

“It’s not … possible.” Sherlock’s voice is barely more than a breath.

“It was Mycroft’s boyfriend?”

No response: That’s a yes, then.

Then something occurs to Sarita that floods her with terror. “Were you protected?”

“Who gives a shit.” 

How can a child contain such self-loathing? _“Sherlock.”_

Heavily: “I’ll get myself tested, all right? Now will you for fuck’s sake please leave it alone? _Just fucking leave it_.”

Sherlock has never sworn at her in his life before. Sarita has always known how to help him; he has always let her help him. During her visit after Anna died, he had slept on a pallet near Sarita’s bed every night for a solid week. She has not the faintest idea what to do for him now. At last she says, “I’m here, Sherlock” — feeble, insufficient, but she fears it’s all he’ll accept. 

This is very nearly the only time that, with respect to Sherlock Holmes, Sarita Banerjee has been wrong.

She waits for his nod before she goes back to bed.


	6. Night-Shining White (Winter 1996 — Spring 1997)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Up, down, turn around,  
> Please don’t let me hit the ground …
> 
> \- New Order, “Temptation”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the extraordinary Tang Dynasty portrait of the horse of the same name, which you may see at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC if you are fortunate enough to visit. The visual pun doesn't work, since "horse" is heroin and not coke, but when I started thinking about Sherlock and cocaine, the phrase "night-shining white" came into my head and simply would not leave.

It is eleven o’clock on a Saturday night, so even if the Lensfield Street labs were not shut Sherlock could be certain of solitude in which to work. He takes half a dozen syringes from his stash -- he lifts them from the health center every chance he gets, because he often needs blood samples for his experiments and it’s tedious trying to explain this to people — and throws on his coat.

Volume 81, Issue 1, of _Forensic Science International,_ of which Sherlock has been working his way through the archives, includes an article by a team of Japanese researchers on the uses of specialized mass spectrometry for identifying arsenic in blood and stomach contents. Unlike the researchers, Sherlock has not got access to the stomach contents of a person who has committed suicide by ingesting arsenic, but he does have some arsenic, as well as access to his own blood and, if he induces vomiting, to his stomach contents. If he can’t quite replicate the published experiment, he can at least approximate it and refine his skills.

Sherlock long ago acquired a set of keys to the lab building: using a key is always faster than picking a lock, adept though he is at the latter, and the less time he spends working at the door, the shorter the interval in which he might be spotted. He lets himself in and heads for the lab he prefers for unauthorized experiments: second story and at the rear of the building, well away from the backing street. People rarely look up as they walk, and even if they saw a light, they wouldn’t likely register it as illicit, but Sherlock always draws the blinds anyway.

He opens the door of the lab, flips the switch for the lights over the nearest workstation, walks forward three paces, and freezes in his tracks. Someone’s already here: three someones, male, students, familiar, his year. Sherlock takes a step back, reaching behind him for the door handle, his heart banging. Ambush, he’s been ambushed, nothing like this has happened since secondary school. He had come to believe the bullies had moved on to other pursuits. His eyes prickle. Damn it, will there _never_ —

“Holmes!” Victor Trevor, who has always behaved civilly to him. There is a twisting sensation, which Sherlock dismisses. 

“Sorry, we didn’t mean to startle you. We heard you coming up the stairs and thought you were a watchman. We — ”

“ _Oh._ ” They’re not here to knock him about or leave him handcuffed to the plumbing or — They’re only doing something illegal. That’s all right, then. “I’ve mislaid my lab notebook, hoped it might be here.” Sherlock has had this lie prepared, along with a dummy notebook in his work drawer, since he first needed to conduct any private researches.

“Yeah. Holmes … well. You won’t mention that you saw us here?”

Sherlock frowns. “Why should I? It’s no concern of mine.” He reaches again for the door.

One of the others whispers something. Sherlock has never learned his name: he’s not clever enough to be interesting, nor is he vicious and therefore a subject of scrutiny for potential vulnerabilities.

“Holmes, wait.”

Sherlock turns back.

“You’re good at chemistry.”

Sherlock inclines his head.

“The fact is, we’ve got some coke, and we’ve been trying to work out how to purify it. And. Well, would you be willing to help?”

“We’d give you a cut,” the whisperer puts in. Overbye, that’s it. 

Sherlock considers. The task is dull, not in itself worth his time, but in its favor it will put Trevor and his friends in Sherlock’s debt. True, his time at Cambridge has so far been refreshingly free of the kinds of incidents that made secondary school so dreary, but here is an opportunity to purchase something like insurance, dirt cheap. “All right,” he says. “What is it normally cut with? You realize I can’t test for every possible adulterant.”

“Speed,” Overbye says. “Ephedrine. Pseudephedrine.”

Sherlock is appalled. “And you don’t purify it as a matter of course?”

There is some shifting of feet. “Well, no,” Trevor says. “I don’t know anyone who does.”

They expect that the adulterants will at worst be undesirable. Trevor and Overbye and their like go about, Sherlock realizes with great force, in the belief that the world is arranged for their safety and comfort. The sensation of difference from other people is familiar, of course, but in this moment he feels as if he were watching several animated dolls from a great distance, or perhaps as if he himself is a clever automaton. A wave of longing strikes him, but he doesn’t know for what, and anyway the feeling is useless. He rubs two fingers against the lab table nearest him; it’s cool, intelligible, calming. “Give me the material, then.”

Overbye, whose idea this was in the first place, balks briefly.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I won’t destroy it. You’ll get back less mass than you started with, yes. You _do_ understand that?”

Overbye nods. “I know. Just — ” He shrugs, and hands over a small plastic bag. Ten or fifteen grams’ worth, good.

The three stand about dumbly while Sherlock dons safety glasses and decants the powder into a beaker under a fume hood. Ephedrine first: C10H15NO. He stirs in a few milliliters of chloroform. Cocaine (C17H21NO4) will dissolve in chloroform (CHCl3); ephedrine will not. He filters the resulting mixture into a shallow basin. The ephedrine, undissolved, remains in the filter paper and what passes through is a solution of cocaine in chloroform. Sherlock discards the filter paper to a chorus of gasps. “It’s _ephedrine._ You wanted to get rid of it, didn’t you? The chloroform will have to evaporate overnight.”

“What?” Overbye again.

“Chloroform. Evaporate. Overnight. Leaving behind the cocaine that is now in solution. — Keep your heads clear of the fumes, haven’t you learned any lab practice at all in three years?”

Trevor, Overbye, and the third — Sherlock hasn’t even deleted his name; he never knew it in the first place — look goggle-eyed. Sherlock sighs. “Are you nitwits? I can’t make this process instantaneous. I haven’t even started clearing out any amphetamine or pseudephedrine there may be, and I haven’t time to stay here and mind the fume hood.”

“We’ve got to hide the pan, though.”

Trevor is stating the obvious, but at least he _notices_ the obvious, which is more than can be said of his little friends. “Bravo, so we do. Fortunately, I have a spot in mind.” Sherlock hikes himself onto the counter, stands, and fishes the basin of cocaine-chloroform solution out from under the hood, keeping his face averted. Between the ceiling and the top of the stores cabinet above the counter is a gap of about six inches. Sherlock slides the pan in, climbs down, dusts off his hands, and delivers his best fake smile. Trevor smiles back, perhaps somewhat timidly; with surprise, Sherlock registers that he’s impressed with Sherlock’s skills and cleverness. Is this pleasant? Perhaps. He doesn’t care to leave first, with the trio behind him, however, so he stares pointedly at the door to encourage them to go.

 “Hold on,” says Anonymous, “how do we know you won’t just steal our cocaine?”

“As it’s dissolved in chloroform at present —” Sherlock begins, but Trevor takes Anonymous by the biceps and hauls him out. “Don’t be an ass,” Sherlock hears him say. “Nobody’s ever even seen him at a party, for God’s sake; he doesn’t touch the stuff.” Trevor then sticks his head back around the door and gives Sherlock an apologetic grimace.

*

Trevor appears alone the next evening; Overbye and Anonymous have evidently decided to leave Sherlock to him. The chloroform has thoroughly evaporated so Sherlock stirs ethyl alcohol into the pretty white crystals that remain, filters out the undissolved amphetamine, and puts the resulting solution back on top of the cabinet. “That’s it, then?” Trevor asks, hopefully.

“No; when did you think I might have got rid of the pseudephedrine?” If only Trevor would leave, Sherlock could begin his arsenic experiment; last night, with his head full of the imaginings that came when he turned on the light and saw the three men already there, he had returned to his rooms the moment he was entirely sure they had gone.

“What are you really here for, then?” Trevor asks, with unexpected astuteness. “You never came back looking for your lab notebook — you wouldn’t lose that any more than you’d lose your left eye.”

“Research,” Sherlock says, shortly. He puts his hands in his pockets.

Trevor does, to his credit, appear to recognize when a line of questioning has been terminated. “We didn’t even talk about what cut to give you.”

Sherlock shrugs. Because he was frightened, he has not only postponed an important experiment, but also forgotten — forgotten! — to conduct the negotiation that would screen his real reason for agreeing to this project. He seizes at a figure — “Ten percent” — then shrinks inwardly. Trevor will perceive that Sherlock has chosen a percentage more or less at random, with no idea of what is customary here; that therefore Sherlock’s motive must be other than to acquire cocaine; that therefore Sherlock is somehow vulnerable.

“That’s — that’s very fair,” Trevor says, in evident relief. “Thanks.”

Sherlock pulls up the corners of his mouth. Was he meant to ask for more of the cocaine? 

“So, uh, just the pseudephedrine after tonight?”

Ah, back on firm ground now, surrounded by idiots. “I believe that was the last of the probable contaminants we discussed.”

“Right, then. So, I’ll pick it up—”

“The evening after next, yes. This time is fine. Good night.” He experiments with a little shooing motion and, sure enough, it works: out goes Trevor through the door. Sherlock lets ten minutes elapse, in case he should reappear, but thankfully that seems to be all. He sets up for his arsenic experiment and swabs his inner forearm with alcohol to draw the needed blood. He forgot to eat today, so there’s nothing much in his stomach and he doesn’t bother to induce vomiting. It occurs to him that he could probably use the product of one of the frequent regurgitations by his landlord’s cat, in any case, and as he really doesn’t like sticking his fingers down his throat that course seems preferable.

*

Trevor and his friends declare themselves pleased, more than pleased, with the results of Sherlock’s work. The high, Trevor explains several batches later, while Sherlock pointedly doesn’t listen, is subtle but far richer than what they’ve been used to. Conversation sparkles. Sex —

“I’ll remove the contaminants for you, but for God’s sake spare me the details of your religious experiences,” says Sherlock.

“Right. Sorry. You ought to try it, though.”

“Not interested.”

“What are you doing with your share, then?”

Sherlock presses his lips together. Nothing about Trevor and his friends suggests that any activity they engage in (possibly including eating and sleeping) is worth Sherlock’s time, so pinches and quarter-grams are beginning to accumulate in the glass bottle he stores the cocaine in. He’s been considering some of the drugs-analysis articles in _Forensic Science International_ , seeing whether he can replicate the experiments described there, but he knows better than to tell Trevor so. The howls of dismay (and the mockery, he admits to himself) if his “clients” knew he meant to use precious cocaine for any purpose other than the acquisition of a temporary sense of superiority hardly bear thinking of. Anyway, it’s none of Trevor’s business.

“You’re not selling it on?”

Sherlock gives him a look. The fact is he’s been thinking rather the opposite: that, since he has no use for more cocaine than he already has in his possession, he might renegotiate for a cash fee instead of barter. With money, he could buy more lab equipment and more biologic samples than the monthly disbursements from his inheritance will stretch to. He could conduct some experiments at home — at least, experiments that don’t require a fume hood.

“Well, suppose you must have some use for it.”

It’s wonderful, Sherlock thinks, how people will explain things to their own satisfaction, even in the absence of any information whatever, if one simply lets them talk. He takes out the chloroform to get started on the new batch Trevor has brought him. “I’ll have this back to you at the weekend,” he says.

“All right, thanks then,” Trevor replies, just as if they have had a conversation, and Sherlock is finally alone to work.

*

Sherlock doesn’t get around to renegotiating his agreement with Trevor. He’s impatient to be getting on with an experiment of his own, or he’s distracted by his own objections to some journal report he’s read, or (he doesn’t quite admit to himself) he’s not entirely confident of how to broach the subject.

*

He’s sitting his final tripos exams during the day, while at night he sets fire to samples of debris (scraps of newspaper; scraps of onionskin paper; pinfeathers from a chicken; clippings of head hair and pubic hair from a male subject, Caucasian, of university age; fingernail clippings, ditto; cheese rinds …) and studies both the gross characteristics and the chemical composition of the resulting ash. Fire being dangerous, and the length and temperature of combustion being important factors in his results, Sherlock needs to stay alert. Catnaps are usually enough to keep him going for a few days, but this week he hasn’t had time even for those. He splashes himself with cold water, he bites his fingers, he forces himself to march up and down the lab while the reactions are taking place. It’s infuriating to be subject to the transport in this way. 

When the idea occurs to him, he is astonished at his own obtuseness.

*

He’s aware, of course, what most people do. They lay out their cocaine in a sliver on a nonporous surface and then inhale it through a rolled-up pound note, or a straw. This is absurd. Sherlock is not thrifty, but he is precise, and he believes in making the fullest use of available resources. Obviously some of the powder must be lost by this method, which is a shortcoming in itself and also ensures that one cannot know exactly how much one has used. Therefore: injection. 

Now to the question of quantity. Sherlock considers what he has heard Trevor and company say about how long they expect each batch to last them. This is enlightening only to the extent of informing him that a gram of pure cocaine is a great deal of cocaine. Fine, he will start small. He weighs out forty milligrams, dissolves it in half a cc of distilled water, and takes it up in his finest-gauge insulin syringe. Years later, John Watson nearly puts a fist through the wall of 221B when he hears this story, for Sherlock is the luckiest of lucky idiots: he guesstimated himself into a reasonably safe dose for a first-time injector.

“On what basis, you great twat, did you set your dosage?”

Sherlock shrugs.

“I mean, why not twenty milligrams? Why not a hundred and fifty, as long as you were about it?”

“Admittedly it wasn’t the soundest basis on which to — ”

“ ‘Soundest basis’! ‘Soundest basis’! You might have _died._ Right then. Dead. In your bloody lab at bloody Cambridge. At the age of _twenty._ Jesus.” John is blinking very fast.

“Twenty-one. And I didn’t die, so what _are_ you on about, John?”

There’s a long pause.

“I would have missed you, Sherlock. My whole life would have had an immense, idiot-shaped absence in it. You _bastard_.”

“John, you wouldn’t have known of my existence. You’d have had other friends.”

John looks at him.

Sherlock tries again: “You make friends easily.”

This is the point at which John nearly puts his fist through the wall of 221B, only Sherlock is fast enough to catch his arm before impact. “It would grieve you,” Sherlock says. “To be without me.”

“Yes, thank you, glad to see you’ve worked that out at last.”

Sherlock drops John’s arm and looks everywhere but at him. “I suppose it’s just as well, then. That I didn’t die.”

“Just as well, yes.”

“Then or later.”

“Yes. And while we’re on the subject, Sarita wouldn’t have liked it much, either.”

Sherlock considers the floor until John takes pity on him. “I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea, you know.”

Visible startlement: “You know where everything is. Help yourself.”

John steers Sherlock into the kitchen and shoves two mugs into his hands. 

*

The bow drops to the string, the string cries out, sound of a train, sound of a whistle, air pushing under extended wings, the updraft bears him, everything visible, everything audible, a wave roaring, glitter of a test tube, dim, exact, the sub-sub-contra-C stop of the Sydney Organ surrounds him, crushing him, he explodes everywhere, brilliant as night, wild, awake —

— and _whoosh_ is sucked back into himself, laughing, sitting on the floor. He was sitting on a stool just a moment ago. Someone has shot cold air into all his spaces. Did he think himself intelligent? No, _this_ is what it means to be intelligent. Sherlock sees at once what was wrong with the protocol he has been trying to replicate. A fundamental error. He pushes himself up toward the lab bench and finds his notebook and his pen and begins to write. He writes till he can’t write anymore and then he hastily clears all his equipment into an empty cupboard without cleaning it and drags himself home and sleeps till the next night is half through.

He fumbles his lab notebook out of the tangle of sheets at the bottom of his bed and carries it with him to the loo, where he rinses the disgusting taste out of his mouth. Then he sits at his desk and deciphers his work; it’s impeccable. The next morning, he pleads exhaustion and is granted permission to postpone the last paper of his tripos until the following Monday. He finishes Trevor’s purification, he sits for the paper, and then he sets about chasing the brilliant night again.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This](http://www.fsijournal.org/article/0379-0738\(96\)01942-1/abstract) is the article from Forensic Science International that Sherlock is reading at the beginning of the chapter. Even if you know nothing about chemistry, you’ll notice that I’ve oversimplified. If you do know something about chemistry, feel free to demand that I refine Sherlock’s experimental plan, only please tell me how to do so correctly. 
> 
> [Here's](http://www.cambridge2000.com/cambridge2000/html/0004/P4090675.html%0A) a photo of the Cambridge University chemistry lab building taken in 2000.
> 
> Sherlock’s method for purifying the cocaine is taken from [this thread](https://drugs-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=27089) at Drugs-Forum.com, a harm-reduction website for users of all kinds of illegal drugs. I’ve assumed the pre-2006 methods apply; if you know better, please inform me and I’ll adjust the narrative accordingly. I like accuracy. For the solvents’ evaporation rates: chloroform is [here](http://www.labchem.com/tools/msds/msds/LC13040.pdf) and ethyl alcohol is [here](http://www.scribd.com/doc/130128861/Evaporation-Rate-of-Solvents#scribd); the reference point for both is the evaporation rate of ether. Chloroform evaporates a bit less than twice as fast as ether, ethyl alcohol 8.3 times more slowly than ether. Since I wasn’t up to working out the interrelationships of quantity and ambient temperature, Sherlock lets each stage sit overnight, which I hope is plenty of time.
> 
> My information about how much pure cocaine to shoot likewise comes from Drugs-Forum.com.
> 
> [Here](http://www.sydneyorgan.com/STH64.mp3) is a recording of the organ stop Sherlock hears when he first shoots up. If you have decent bass it will feel like someone is slamming you in the heart.


	7. The burning fuselage of my days (Spring 1997 — Winter/Spring 1999/2000

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock + cocaine 5eva.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from The Mountain Goats, “Psalms 40:2.”

Mycroft doesn’t often think of Sherlock these days.

But he attempts at least to be truthful with himself, so he is well aware that he avoids thinking of his brother because Sherlock is the hot stone of grief at the center of the world. Sometimes in solitude he offers himself bargains: For a chance to stand barring the door between his beautiful brother and Jim Moriarty, would he slash his wrists in the bathtub now? _Yes, I would._ And then he reminds himself that this is melodrama, that he will never be given any such choice and is probably too much of a coward to make it anyway, just as he was too much of a coward to recognize that Jim desired Sherlock and not him, and too much of a coward to admit he hated Sherlock for it. He has risen to a post that enables him to flag Sherlock’s name in policing and NHS computers as well as in those of the Border Agency; it’s a step in the direction of thorough surveillance and the only simulacrum now available to him of the relationship between older and younger brother. Mycroft acknowledges that outsourcing is often required not only in business but also in personal relations.

*

Catherine normally knocks twice, in the flub-dub cadence of a seated person’s easy heart, so at the sound of four fast raps Mycroft is on his feet and reaching for his coat even before the knob turns. “The police, sir,” Catherine says without preamble. “Cocaine trafficking. Your car is downstairs.”

Even a government car can’t move faster than the traffic jam around it; Mycroft uses the time to chat with a colleague in the Crown Prosecution Service, who informs him that Sherlock had in his flat eighty grams of cocaine, which, it is alleged, he intended to sell. About twenty-five grams of the cocaine appears to be pure. Also in the flat: lab equipment and various chemicals. Mycroft presses for an inventory of the latter and learns to his great interest that though several of the substances present are among those with which cocaine is commonly adulterated, these were all found in Sherlock’s rubbish bin or in the crumpled piles of used filter paper around it. “How much cash did he have?” Mycroft asks.

“Ah … sixty-seven pounds, nine pence.”

“You can’t possibly believe he was trafficking.”

“Purifying drugs for others constitutes production and supply, Mr. Holmes, even if the producer is not a good businessman. I’m afraid eighty grams of cocaine and a flat full of lab equipment speak for themselves.”

Never has Mycroft so longed for power.

*

At the police station, Mycroft lets himself out rather than wait for the driver to open the door. He is chagrined to realize that he has no clear idea of how to proceed; Catherine could have told him, but she would have assumed Mycroft’s expertise, as people almost always do. Or perhaps not — Catherine’s a clever woman; perhaps she thought she might embarrass him if she offered advice unsolicited. Was she correct, in that case? Mycroft pauses on this question, then shakes himself out of his dithering and goes inside.

His Foreign Office ID is enough, at least, to bring him without delay before the officer in charge of the case, a Detective Sergeant Lestrade. Newly minted, Mycroft sees: the insignia on his sleeves are perfect in their crispness. 

“It does look, on the face of it, like something more than small-time dealing.” Lestrade’s voice is surprisingly gentle; Mycroft now enjoys a revelation, though “enjoys” may not be the right word, curious really that it hadn’t occurred to him that Sherlock might be —

“Oh, you didn’t know, did you,” Lestrade says.

Mycroft hastily draws a superior expression over his face. “Please, enlighten me.”

“Peas in a pod,” Lestrade says, under his breath. “Look, Mr. Holmes. Your brother’s arms: tracks up one side and down the other.” Mycroft draws in breath to speak; the detective sergeant holds up a hand. “He’s been seen by a doctor, miracle the man didn’t quit his job after, but anyway the tracks aren’t infected — your brother takes care when he shoots up. Reckon that’s something.

“All right. Normally, that much coke, I’d be sure somebody was dealing. But he had barely any cash, that’s one thing. He says he was getting normal cocaine, what you’d buy from a dealer if you were nobody special, from ‘clients,’ and clearing the adulterants out. Pull the other, I’d say, only while we’re bagging up evidence some fool marches in and the first words out of his mouth, before he twigs he’s talking to police, are ‘Sherlock, have you got my stuff cleaned up yet?’ So that’s a second thing. And, third thing, all the ephedrine and speed in the place were in filter paper in the rubbish bin. Place is a hazardous waste site.

“Trouble is, holding coke for somebody and meaning to give it back to them — that’s supplying drugs, under law. But I’m not such an idiot I can’t see your brother wasn’t in it for the money. And he’s an addict himself. I’m recommending all charges be dropped if he goes to rehab.”

Mycroft holds himself perfectly straight and does not allow his expression to waver. “Is your recommendation dispositive?”

“Not officially, no. But — ” Lestrade shrugs.

“I see.” Mycroft debates complimenting Lestrade on his astuteness, decides he might see it as currying favor on Sherlock’s behalf. “That’s most reassuring, thank you.”

“You think your brother can bring himself to act grateful in front of the judge? Only, the fork in the road is rehab in one direction, a good couple of years in jail on the other.”

Mycroft tries to picture Sherlock at eight, at ten, at fourteen, performing “gratitude” before a person in authority. “I imagine he understands what’s at stake,” he says finally.

Lestrade must have spent some considerable time with Sherlock, to judge by the combination of dismay and incredulity that passes over his face. He pulls at his ear before speaking. “D’you want to see him? It’s not strictly allowed, but I could escort you. Get me out from under the paperwork, just for a minute.”

“Thank you,” Mycroft manages. He takes careful inventory of the muscles in his face.

Lestrade leads him down a narrow hallway with steel doors along the lefthand side. Here Mycroft experiences a sweep of grief — elicited by the smell, yes, it’s that of one of Anna’s hospitalizations. The Metropolitan Police must use the same disinfectant on the floors. Undoubtedly Sherlock has also recognized it. “You understand,” Lestrade says, “I can’t give you any privacy, or allow physical contact, not without more security.”

“I’m grateful to you for bending the regulations at all, Detective Sergeant.” To his own ears, Mycroft’s voice sounds as bland as usual, the voice of the unsurprisable man who has risen far enough to be accorded an office with a garden view and a shining desk whose wood is not veneer. _Bang, bang, bang,_ goes his heart.

Lestrade stops before the third door and speaks through the grate. “Mr. Holmes, your brother’s here.”

Silence. Lestrade frowns. He opens the door to reveal — who? Mycroft’s little brother has gone; Mycroft sold him for the hope of Jim Moriarty’s affections. The man in the holding cell is tall, pale, dark-haired, tilt-eyed. He stands facing the door with his chin up, gaze directed past Mycroft and past the far wall of the corridor. Neither of them speaks.

Mycroft breaks first. “Sherlock — ”

“Hello, Mycroft. I trust you have been well content with life.” His voice is a baritone purr. His sneer is direct from Jim.

“Wouldn’t our mother be proud,” Mycroft returns, feeling sick, unable to help himself.

A flinch. But then: “Our mother would have _much_ to be proud of, Mycroft.” With this, the tap closes. Sherlock turns away from the cell door — not from Mycroft; he has not for an instant focused his gaze on Mycroft — sits on the cot, and draws his knees up to his chin. His eyes close. Mycroft clenches his throat painfully against the sound he wants to make, and attempts to draw up some contempt toward Lestrade for his obvious inability to conceal his interest. This struggle founders on the shoals of the detective sergeant’s tact; he closes the holding cell door gently and ushers Mycroft back down the hall without seeming to chivvy.

As Mycroft is picking up his coat and umbrella, Lestrade says: “Mr. Holmes, is there anything about your brother that I should know? Something that would help me in making my recommendations to the prosecutor?”

It’s curious, Mycroft thinks wearily, how from time to time people of entirely unremarkable intelligence penetrate at once to the center of the target. “I imagine you’ll have to ask him that, Detective Sergeant,” he replies. “As you have no doubt gathered, my brother and I are not at all close.” He nods once. “Thank you again for your assistance today.”

*

Detective Sergeant Gregory Lestrade watches the senior Holmes brother walk down the corridor and out the police station’s swinging doors. He wonders whether the younger Holmes will manage to get clean, what happened between the brothers, why he feels sorry for such a pair of gits.

Why, indeed? Being rich doesn’t solve every problem, but it sure as hell solves one of them. Lestrade turns back to his paperwork.

*

On Lestrade’s recommendation, and with some qualms — “Eighty grams, Detective Sergeant; you’re sure you want to let that go by?” — the Crown Prosecutor charges Sherlock Holmes only with possession of cocaine, not with selling it or producing it. The judge offers him rehabilitation in lieu of a prison sentence. And Holmes — well, Lestrade wouldn’t call Sherlock Holmes plausibly grateful, but he pulls off downcast eyes and a subdued demeanor well enough.

For himself, Lestrade had expected little, and nothing is what he gets. Holmes doesn’t even appear to listen to his testimony, only rubs his fingers on the railing of the dock throughout. Lestrade has about concluded that he was an idiot to extend himself, when Holmes is led past him to await transfer to the rehab facility. He stops — so abruptly that the PC holding his arm stumbles — and thrusts something toward Lestrade, who reflexively takes it. A folded bit of paper. “Here,” says the PC, “you can’t” — but Holmes is whispering in Lestrade’s ear, “Woman in blue dress, third row of spectators, picking pockets,” and then he nods and is gone.

 _Right,_ says the sarcastic inner voice that likes to tell Lestrade he’s soft, but within five minutes he sees the woman lift two wallets, one out of a man’s back trouser pocket, the other out of a woman’s satchel. The second theft takes place while — his head singing with disbelief — he’s threading through the crowd to arrest her for the first. She has five more wallets in her own bag (a Hermès: not counterfeit, PC Sally Donovan informs Lestrade, who has to look Hermès up to appreciate the point; the bag, naturally, turns out to figure in a list of items stolen from a flat in Belgravia last year) and the arrest figures in a very pleasant conversation with his governor concerning his talents and future prospects. Lestrade feels something of a fraud but stands his squad a round all the same.

The next morning he remembers the bit of paper Holmes thrust at him. He finds it in his trouser pocket and unfolds it. It’s blank. He turns it over and over. What is showing off, and what is gratitude?

*

Five months later, he meets Holmes again — this time, sitting in the back of a police car with his hands cuffed behind him. “Planning a runner?” Lestrade asks. Holmes shakes his head. Lestrade unlocks the cuffs, lets Holmes shake out his shoulders, then cuffs him again, in front this time. “Thanks for the tip on the pickpocket,” Lestrade says. “You were right.”

“I’m aware.” Holmes’s eyes are closed now.

“The prosecutor won’t take me seriously when I recommend rehab again.”

“On the other hand, I’m not in possession this time.”

“No? What would we find in your flat, then?”

“My flat is entirely devoid of cocaine, Detective Sergeant Lestrade. Why do you suppose I came here?”

That drawl could annoy the proletariat straight into revolution. “Ha bloody ha.” Lestrade pauses. “You shouldn’t be wasting yourself like this.”

“Mm. Money, education, youth, _beauty_. Genius, too. All wasted. Pity, really. ‘He could have accomplished so much.’” And then Holmes is scrambling right over Lestrade and out the car’s open door. Running — where the hell is he running? Not away, no. Straight toward their chief suspect, Porteous, who’s coming out of the block of flats with DC Anderson at his biceps. Lestrade catches up to Holmes just as he reaches them; he grabs Holmes’s arm, opens his mouth to shout, and then hears what Holmes is saying:

“Where’s the bird. Porteous, _where is the bird_?”

“You’re joking,” Porteous says. He looks genuinely astonished.

“You had it, it’s obvious you had it. Oh! You binned it.” And Holmes turns in a slow circle, then breaks out of Lestrade’s grip and bolts again, Lestrade behind him.

Lestrade was never a sprinter and never will be; Holmes is taller and skinny and much of him is leg. The cuffs throw off his balance but he’s still well ahead when he stops in front of a waste bin and pulls out a crumpled mass of brown paper. He puts this into Lestrade’s hands — “London Zoo have an avian vet on staff. Get her, maybe it’ll live” — and then walks back to the car and folds himself into the seat as if nothing had happened. 

Lestrade gingerly unwraps one end of the brown paper to reveal the brilliant blue head of a parrot, lids half closed. It gives a general impression of being alive, not that he has the faintest idea of how to check the vital signs of a bird, and anyway, he’s afraid of the beak. Cradling the bundle, he trots over to the car. “You wouldn’t happen to know her number, would you? The vet’s.”

Holmes rolls his eyes. “Just call the main number. Or, if that’s too difficult, give me your mobile and I’ll dial it myself.”

“I don’t, in fact, know the main number for the London Zoo off the top of my head.” Lestrade fumbles around the bundle of bird to find his phone. He thinks he has a headache coming on, or maybe that’s just a demotion.

Holmes dials and gives back the phone. “Tell her it’s a hyacinth macaw. She’ll be quick.”

She is quick — in fact, she pulls up with tires screeching. “Lestrade, who’s Lestrade here?” she shouts, not so much as turning off her engine. “Amelia Choudhury.” She checks the bird over, wraps it in a warming blanket, and pronounces it stressed and hungry but likely to survive. Lestrade comes in for rapid-fire thanks, during which he opens his mouth to tell Choudhury it’s the handcuffed man in the back seat she should be thanking, but then he sees that Holmes has turned his head away entirely, so closes his mouth again.

“How did you know?” he asks, after the vet has gone. He doesn’t remember seeing a cage in the flat, or perches, or parrot food for that matter. Well, Choudhury did say the bird was hungry.

An aggrieved sigh. The man could make getting a knighthood the subject of complaint, not that there’s any danger of his being offered one. “There was a feather in the loo.”

“A feather.”

“A clean, untrampled, brilliant blue feather. On the floor of the _filthy_ loo. Whither the very recent bearer of the feather? One had to wonder. Even the Met’s idiots would have spotted a bird the size of a hyacinth macaw had it been anywhere in the flat.”

“Why’d he get rid of it, then?” But Lestrade sees the answer to this one coming before Holmes speaks. “Never mind. Illegally imported. All right, he sent someone out the window to bin the bird. Funny he didn’t get rid of the drugs, as well.”

Another eyeroll. Lestrade wants to glue the bastard’s eyeballs in place. “Missing the point. Hyacinth macaws are about as endangered as it’s possible to be. No more than — fifty? a hundred? are traded worldwide in a year. Legally, that is. Private ownership of such a bird is bound to raise questions about sourcing. I think you’ll find that Porteous has a friend in the force, and that they agreed to leave the drugs in the flat so as to divert attention from some larger enterprise. Wholesale importation of endangered birds, perhaps?”

Lestrade stares. “You got that from a feather. Really. Not from an inside source.”

Holmes draws his lips between his teeth. “No, not from an inside source,” he says at last, very quietly, and will not look at Lestrade again.

*

In his testimony during Holmes’s trial, Lestrade is careful to emphasize that the first words out of the defendant’s mouth when he found the bird had to do with its veterinary care. When he answers the next question, he turns his head toward Holmes and pitches his voice there:

“Yes, thanks to the defendant, it did survive. I saw it yesterday.”

Holmes glances up, expressionless.

Rehab, again.

*

A postcard, bearing no return address, arrives at NSY:

_Lestrade —_

_Bessing murder. Contra news reports, power saw not needed for dismemberment. Handsaw adequate for millennia before electric power available. Handyman w/power tools not the killer. Usual boring domestic: ask husband._

_SH_

Lestrade asks the husband.

This time, he gets a formal commendation.

*

Lestrade thinks of Sherlock Holmes often. Idly, he checks voter records, looking for an address, but his expectations are borne out when he finds nothing. Civic-minded Holmes: that’s a laugh.

*

Anderson, passing by Lestrade’s desk, says, “Arrested your pet cokehead again the other day. Parrot Boy? In possession, naturally. Don’t waste your time. He’s going down fast.”

*

Sherlock notices that his hair is filthy. He thinks about washing it, but he’s too busy.

*

Cocaine is expensive, and the monthly disbursements from his inheritance go only so far.

*

A man is looking at Sherlock. Sherlock agrees to fellate him for £20 and goes to his knees, but he gets only as far as unzipping the man’s trousers. “Sorry,” he says, standing up; “Not my night for it,” so the man curses him for a useless whore and leaves.

*

Sherlock sells his microscope.

* 

Sherlock snatches a purse from a chair at an outdoor café and runs. He extracts the cash and throws everything else behind him, as in a depiction of a Russian sleigh pursued by wolves.

* 

Sherlock shoots up and hears bells ringing. People say this is the sign of a near overdose. He wonders, before heat flashes through him, whether it’s the sign of an overdose as well.

*

Sherlock wakes. It’s dark everywhere, including in his flat, where the electricity has been cut off. Where is the violin, where where _where_ — In its case, behind the toilet. The bow is gone, how he doesn’t remember, but when he runs his hand over and over the instrument he finds no cracks. He sets the violin, in its case, on his mattress, then gropes under the sink for the sliver of Fairy Soap he remembers seeing there. He takes a shower in the dark, carefully cleaning the infected skin of his arms. When he’s done, he turns the water cold and stands under it till he can’t anymore.

*

Time passes. Sherlock keeps his arms clean, letting them heal, and shoots between his toes instead. After three weeks, the scars in the crooks of his elbows and down his forearms aren’t too conspicuous, he thinks — at least, not conspicuous to idiots.

He hasn’t emailed Sarita Banerjee in months, having no computer and nothing true to tell her. He doesn’t email her now, nor post a letter.

His passport is still valid. He steals wallets till he has enough cash to get him to New York City. One way. He can always buy the return, if he needs it. Either he will, or he won’t.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know Mycroft’s assistant is not-Anthea, but the woman who plays her in Sherlock is way too young to have been on the job in the late 1990s. 
> 
> The hyacinth macaw is desperately endangered and the discovery of one in a rubbish bin would surely bring an avian vet running. I don’t know for sure that the London Zoo had such a vet on staff in the time period when this chapter’s set. Sherlock’s figures on the legal trade in hyacinth macaws reflect my guesstimate. See [this](http://www.bluemacaws.org/en-gb/articles/report-on-the-hyacinth-macaw-in-the-audubon-wildlife-report%0A) for more detailed info. 
> 
> Sherlock’s postcard to Lestrade draws on [“Knife and Saw Toolmark Analysis in Bone: A Manual Designed for the Examination of Criminal Mutilation and Dismemberment,”](https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/232227.pdf) a report prepared for the US Department of Justice by Steven A. Symes, Ph.D., Erin N. Chapman, M.S., Christopher W. Rainwater, M.S., Luis L. Cabo,M.S., and Susan M.T. Myster, Ph.D. in 2010 and hence not actually available to him at the date when this episode takes place. But hey! He’s Sherlock.
> 
> People do report hearing bells ring when they nearly overdose on coke. Hyperthermia is an effect of overdose.


	8. Sanctuary (April — July 2000)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What the fuck, Sherlock, what the fuck, look at you, oh, what the fuck have you done, you lovely child, what … ”

It’s a long walk from her lab at Columbia to her co-op on West Sixteenth, a solid five miles, but a couple of times a week, if the weather’s fine and she’s done early enough, Sarita will hike it. If she and Władek aren’t cooking or going out, she might pick up some takeout on Ninth Avenue.

On this particular April evening, the evening of the first clear day after a week of drizzle and even, offensively, some sleet, Sarita’s stomach is rumbling over the stuffed eggplant and kasarli kofte that have been weighing down her right side since Forty-sixth Street, and as she turns the corner from Ninth she is not happy to see the guy bent over on her stoop, bang in the middle of the second step so there’s no room to pass on either side of him. A duffel bag occupies the space between his knees. “Hey! Come on, people use these stairs.”

The guy’s head snaps up. Gray face under his hoodie. Sarita clicks her tongue and looks away, feeling the usual mix of pity, guilt, disgust. Addiction a disease, yes yes, blazingly hard to stop once you’re well gone, yes, all right; but she’s met enough drunks and junkies to have learned to be heartily sick and tired of their behavior even before they start in with the whining and the excuses.

“I’m … I wanted to be sure I didn’t miss you coming home,” the guy says. English! Not only English, but _posh_. Then he does four things in rapid succession. He pushes the hoodie off his hair, stands, puts his steepled hands to his mouth in a way that makes her gasp, and says,

“Miss— Doctor Banerjee. No. That’s—” He twists his hands together. “Stupid, this is stupid. I thought perhaps if I spoke with you, or—” That seems to be all he can manage. He gives her one quick glance and then stands there, fingertips still at his mouth, head bowed.

Sarita cannot speak. She takes hold of the handrail and carefully sets down the bags from Turkish Cuisine. Her entire interior seems to have been taken over by a pinball machine with the balls ricocheting _ping!_ it can’t be _ping!_ what the hell — _ping!_ — what has he done? _ping!_ — and at that she finds her voice: “What the hell, Sherlock, what the hell, what the bloody fucking hell have you done to yourself?” and she bursts out crying and when he makes as if to touch her she backs away and screams, “ _Don’t you fucking touch me,_ Sherlock Holmes, just sit right the _fuck_ down right now sit down!” and he obeys instantly without a word and Sarita stands over him wailing and wiping the snot away from under her nose. “What the fuck, Sherlock, what the fuck, look at you, oh, what the fuck have you done, you lovely child, what … ” She doesn’t even try to make herself stop: let him feel every bit of this, every last and tiniest snotty coughing choking bit, let him see.

At last, when she’s good and ready, she finds some tissues in her bag, blows her nose three times, clears her throat, blows her nose again, and says, “All right. You’d better come in.” Only then does she see that he’s weeping too. _Good. Let him._  

*

Sarita puts away the takeout and calls Władek to tell him she has to cancel and she’ll talk to him later. Then she makes two cups of strong tea and sits down across from Sherlock at the kitchen table where she has parked him. “I’m well out of my depth, Sherlock. You’re using drugs. All right, what drugs?”

“Cocaine. Only cocaine. I found— I found I didn’t like any others.”

Others. Never mind; if he didn’t like the others, he didn’t use the others, whatever they were. Follow the thread. “How long?”

“Three years now. More.”

Sarita looks back over Sherlock’s last term at Cambridge, the year after that, the year after that. She had noticed, with amusement, the length and discursiveness of certain emails, a certain grandiosity, too, before the emails tapered away and then stopped. Her interior kaleidoscope turns: “brilliant young man full of himself and too busy for an old friend” reappears as “coked-out yammerer no longer able to keep up appearances.” Yes, and this is why he wouldn’t visit no matter how many times she invited him. What else? “You should be sniffling, shouldn’t you? Oh. No, you inject.”

Sherlock nods without looking up.

“When did you last … ?”

He pushes air through his nose, something like a laugh. “At Heathrow, before the security check. Last of my supply. Last syringe.”

There was a night when she woke to find Sherlock huddling sleepless in her living room. “Needles, Sherlock—” She halts in her tracks. Far more danger here than in anything done to him by that man: careless of Sherlock but surely careful of himself, he would have taken precautions with anyone who wasn’t a virgin child— The tears are starting again. Next to her tea mug, she clenches a fist to stop them.

“No. No, it’s— Almost everybody else snorted, anyway. And I haven’t— I didn’t— Well, I tried, but I couldn’t, so I sold things. Or, or I stole.”

 _Stop, stop, stop._ Sarita doesn’t want to know this, doesn’t want to think of that brilliant, demanding, enchanting child reduced to a young man selling sex ( _trying to sell sex_ ) to the kind of people willing to buy sex from the desperate young. Then she thinks of Mycroft’s boyfriend again, and gets a grip on herself, more or less. “You’ll have tried to stop.”

“Well. Rehab was … ” He shrugs.

Rehab? Sarita can no more picture Sherlock in rehab than she can picture him attending a Renaissance Faire.

He reads her astonishment, of course. “I was given it as an option. Instead of jail.”

Oh, he has been brought low, so low. This is a life Sarita has only ever seen from outside. She’s a professor of chemistry, for God’s sake. She studies antifreeze proteins in cold-water fishes and has a tank full of flounder in her lab. She’s back on her stoop looking at the guy in the hoodie, furious and sick with grief, her mind ricocheting from impossibility to impossibility. She puts her head in her hands; she can’t speak.

Sherlock does, though, quickly. “I am in withdrawal now. I want cocaine very badly and I don’t know how long that desire will continue; on the basis of my past experiences of withdrawal, in the rehabilitation facilities, I expect little remission over the next month at least, though there may be occasional brief decrements. For some weeks, again I don’t know for how long as I have never come to the end of it, I shall be low in spirits, and irritable. I shall fret over what appears to you to be nothing. I cannot” — he swallows hard — “I cannot imagine that I would harm you physically, but I may steal from you.” He looks directly at Sarita now, his lips pressed together. “It would be best if you put me out.”

“Oh,” Sarita says before she can catch herself, “I could _slap_ you.”

Sherlock’s eyes go wide.

She expels a breath slowly. “I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this. You know how I came to be your nanny, how and why?”

“Your parents had been killed in a car accident.”

“Yes. Anna thought it might help me to live with friends. The job of nannying was to save my pride, really, and to occupy my time.”

“You’re saying you are indebted to my mother. That shouldn’t concern you. She’s dead, you might have noticed.”

“Would that be the irritability coming up, or are you just being an arse? Sherlock, while you were busy noticing things, have you noticed I don’t have a child?”

Sherlock frowns. “Why is that relevant?”

“Because _I don’t like children,_ Sherlock. I have never liked children. Yet I remained as your nanny for three and a half years and then visited with you regularly until I took the job at Columbia. Would you like to speculate about my reasons?”

If not for the circumstances, she could enjoy seeing Sherlock so flummoxed. No, strike that — under no circumstances would it be pleasant to realize that he is incapable of drawing the obvious conclusion here. She speaks as gently as she can:

“I fell head over heels for you. Your curiosity, your insistence on learning everything you could about whatever crossed your path, the eruptions of logic you brought into situations typically governed by habits and received ideas — oh, you drove me mad. You were the best possible companion for an intelligent person undone by grief.”

Sherlock has drawn into himself, arms folded, hair fallen forward. His torso twists as if he is trying to escape but someone has tied him to the chair. Sarita continues:

“I am frightened by your reasons for needing me now, Sherlock, and by the prospects for your behavior toward me in the near future. I don’t quite know how I shall cope. But don’t for a moment imagine that you can talk me into abandoning you.” Sarita finds that her voice is hoarse and that she is gripping the table. Well, that should make an impression. She can’t remember any time she shouted at Sherlock before this evening, and now she’s come unhinged three times. Four times? Oh, this is going to be exhausting. She shakes the bracelets on her left wrist just to hear them jingle.

*

Sherlock phones his bank in London and tells them not to disburse any money from his inheritance for the next two months.

(“I could have them pay it direct into your account.”

(“No amount of money would induce me to undergo the horrors you are about to inflict on me, Sherlock. You will simply have to face the fact that I am doing this because I love you.”

(“Expenses.”

(“Really. I’m a tenured professor at a large American university. I can afford to feed you.”

(Silence.)

He cannot be trusted with cash, however. He hands it over to Sarita, all he has.

Every morning, he goes to work with her. If she is at the lab, then while she analyzes fish blood he paces or sits, jittering, and reads chemistry journals, forensics texts, the _New York Post_. If she is lecturing, he sits in the corner of the seminar room farthest from the door, so that she’ll have time to grab him if he bolts. While she lectures, he reads: more chemistry journals, more forensics texts, the _New York Post_.

Or if he is not reading, he sleeps. He sleeps a great deal — he is tired, tired, so tired that some mornings Sarita will barge her way to a seat on the uptown train just so she can turn it over to him. 

He wants to die, but Sarita makes him promise not to kill himself. He snaps at her and rages at her and tells her to get out of his way because he needs to get some coke, so she takes the cushions off the couch and makes herself a nest in front of the apartment door. “I cannot imagine that I would harm you physically,” Sherlock had said, so she falls asleep with the sound of his hissing in her ears. There is more than one such episode. Sometimes, the next morning, he will scrub ineffectually at the breakfast dishes. Sarita makes him eat: Fruit and an egg for breakfast. A sandwich for lunch. Whatever dinner she manages. He gains some weight and his skin grows a little more lucid.

Władek resents Sherlock. Sarita doesn’t blame him, because not only does Sherlock monopolize her time, making it impossible for them to go to a movie, or eat a meal in a decent restaurant, or have sex, but also he sometimes won’t shower for two or three days and then he snarls at Sarita when she remarks on the pong and points him to the bathroom door. Władek wants to defend Sarita, which she might appreciate more if she weren’t so bloody sick of Sherlock herself, and trying to keep a lid on it. She has explained to Władek why this passage must be endured, but it’s hard for him. Sherlock is a mess but he’s young and beautiful anyway; and brilliant. Władek is brilliant, and he is no older than Sarita, but he is bald and shy. It is hard for him to keep in mind that to Sarita, Sherlock is entirely a friend and, also entirely, a cherished ward; that long ago she gave him a pet rat for company, and that when he was not five years old he gasped and his eyes went wide when he saw that she had brought him a plaice to dissect.

Sherlock overhears one of their arguments and tries to leave again. “Sherlock,” she tells him, “I cannot bear another night of barring the way out of my apartment with my fitfully sleeping body. Go to bed, for the sake of all the gods, or I shall knock you unconscious and chain you to the radiator.” Sherlock goes to bed.

*

Sarita sets up her blood-draw kit and prepares the anesthesia tank with a solution of tricaine mesylate, then transfers into it one of the flounders sunk in the sand of the lab’s immense cold-water aquarium. “Show me how you draw the blood,” Sherlock says. Sarita can hardly speak for joy; this is the first time she has heard from him anything like the constant, imperious demanding of information she loved so much when he was five, when he was seven, when he was twenty. “Scrub your hands before you glove up,” she tells him, “or your nasty human bacterial colonies will kill the fish.” He follows her instructions obediently, returning to the anesthesia tank just as Sarita is lifting out the fish. She turns it to open the mouth and show him the dorsal aorta. “The alternative is to do a caudal venous puncture, here” — she turns the fish again — “but I have less trouble going through the mouth. It’s important to be quick, of course, once they’re out of water.”

“Of course,” Sherlock says. His face is alight with interest.

Sarita draws a milliliter of blood and caps off the tiny collection tube. “Here, you can put him in the recovery tank for a bit.”

“I could help you with the blood draws,” Sherlock says, setting the flounder carefully on the floor of the recovery tank. Only now does Sarita register that her stock of syringes and fine needles has, for the past half hour, not been under lock and key. She spins toward him, alarmed, and when he meets her gaze he holds out his hands, palms upward. “Okay?” she says. She reaches up to stroke his hair, something she hasn’t done since he was maybe ten years old. He shuts his eyes under her hand, and nods.

*

That was day thirty-eight. During the evening of day forty-four, however, Sherlock crumples into the corner of the sofa and will not move or speak. When his bladder forces him up the next morning, Sarita sees that he has dug bloody crescents into his arms, clutching himself so tightly. That’s enough of that. She bullies him into the shower and gets in after him. She washes his naked unresisting body, she dries it, she dries herself, she dresses both of them. She sits him, still limp and blank, at her table while she makes sandwiches. The sandwiches go in a backpack and the backpack goes on Sherlock’s back. Then she takes his elbow and drags him out the door, down the stairs, and westward, toward the Hudson. By the time they reach Tenth Avenue, Sherlock has exhausted even his immense capacity for mute demonstration of how wretched he is and is drawing offensive inferences about various passersby. Sarita tries not to laugh, and then stops trying and just works on maintaining an appropriately scandalized tone.

*

On day fifty-nine, Sarita says: “Can you go to the supermarket?” Not “Will you,” but “Are you able?” Sherlock touches his fingers to his lips, thinking. He takes the two twenties Sarita hands him, and her shopping list, and a set of keys.

He’s been alone very little in the past two months — mainly in the bathroom, and not always then. Walking out of Sarita’s building and around the corner, out of sight, feels like being peeled. Long sleeves are bearable in June, so his scars — faded as much as they’re going to fade, he suspects — are hidden. He draws some glances, but he’s not the Chelsea gym-bunny _beau idéal_. Nor has he got to look out for the police, now. Soon enough the sense of himself as an object of scrutiny begins to fade and he absorbs himself in study of the market shelves — a novelty, because in London he ate mostly takeaway or, when it was especially hard to procure money for cocaine, whatever was not spoiled and had found its way into a rubbish bin. Every so often he remembers to consult Sarita’s list; finally, feeling satisfied, he pays and turns his steps toward Sixteenth Street —

— to find that two hours have passed and Sarita is sitting on the couch with her head in her hands. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says, “see, here’s everything on your list, only there was so much to look at, I don’t at all see the need for so many variations on the theme of extruded grain, do you, and I have your change, it’s right here, look, and the receipt, I haven’t done anything, I didn’t even think about cocaine the whole time …” This last isn’t quite true, but close.

“You arse, I’m going to buy you a portable alarm clock and next time, you’ll take it with you.” Sarita sorts through the grocery bags. “Of all the processed cereals available that weren’t on my list, why Apple Jacks?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“You’re not planning to eat them, I hope.”

“No no no no no. I want to analyze them, of course. I thought I might try to fractionate out all these food colorings. Yellow, blue, red, and this ‘turmeric color,’ obviously another form of yellow — why can’t they just use one kind, I wonder — what color do you suppose the base product is, minus the kiddies’ art class the manufacturer’s chemists have evidently been conducting?”

“You’re bored,” Sarita says.

“Well.”

“You had a grand time on your outing to the Fourteenth Street Associated Supermarket. More outings, then. And I’m putting you properly to work in my lab; no more of this whiling away the merry hours with that dreadful tabloid and occasional breaks to draw blood samples. You may conduct controlled explosions of American breakfast food to your heart’s content, but only so long as you also help me work out the structural properties of antifreeze proteins.”

“By ‘outings,’” Sherlock says, “you mean ‘errands.’”

Sarita folds her arms at him. “Yes. Exactly so.”

*

Sherlock arrived at Sarita’s in mid-April; his order to his bank will expire on June 30, day seventy. He opens an account in New York and has the disbursement sent there. July 1 is a Saturday. On Monday and Tuesday his New York bank is closed for some absurd holiday entailing fireworks. Sherlock itches and fumes. On Wednesday he shakes his head when Sarita points out that she has an experiment to run; she frowns, but doesn’t argue. He walks her to the subway station at the end of the block and then bolts.

*

He has a name, and the name was in the phone directory — not a foregone conclusion, that, when the name is one he used to hear spoken reverently by an old violin teacher who died while Sherlock was at university. The Lower East Side Mr. Friedenberg used to describe was a homely place of shuls and tailors’ shops and discount clothing stores; Sherlock marks two transitions between then and now. The poor folk who preceded the first of these, and the drugs traders who followed, have been largely pushed out by trendy restaurants and shoddy-chic makeovers of cold-water flats, and with the poor have gone the proletarian politics; but traces remain. Angry graffiti; tiny, colorful caps, detached from their vials and sprinkled confetti-like here and there. Sherlock never did smoke crack. He stops and looks at a patch of caps and vials, trying to decide whether any nostalgia or longing attaches itself to them. In the end he isn’t sure, so he puts the question aside and walks on.

Only when he reaches the address he has memorized does he realize he didn’t think to call ahead. Somehow the fact that Mr. Friedenberg was always where he was meant to be when Sherlock arrived for his lesson has bled into his expectations for this stranger. Stupid. He presses the buzzer anyway. “My name is Sherlock Holmes,” he tells it when it squawks back at him. “I was a student of Jacob Friedenberg’s.”

Milton Blaufelt looks a bit like a violin bow himself, skinny and tensely compressed. He must be a foot shorter than Sherlock. He makes them tea with lemon, the same way Mr. Friedenberg used to when he and Sherlock would sit together after a lesson, waiting for Anna or Robert to collect Sherlock; only, unlike Mr. Friedenberg, Milton Blaufelt uses teabags and squeezes a liquid resembling lemon juice out of a plastic replica of a lemon. Sherlock recalls seeing these at the supermarket; there was a lime version as well. But he is being polite, so he takes some tea.

Mr. Friedenberg used to talk about music, of course, and about musicians and instrument makers he had known. He had never had a better bow, he said, than Milton Blaufelt’s. Sherlock twists his hands in his lap, impatiently, explaining all this. He needs a bow, preferably last Saturday, which was, after all, the first of July and the day he should have been able to lay his hands on more than sufficient cash to buy a good one, whereas today is Wednesday, and he still has not got a bow and his fingers itch. This is, come to think of it, exactly like waiting for the dealer to sell him some cocaine: an unpleasant comparison, in response to which Sherlock forces his shoulders to relax.

“Let’s see your violin,” says Blaufelt, having belabored Sherlock for an excruciating time with reminiscences of how he and Mr. Friedenberg met. (There was a string quartet, under the auspices of something called the Workmen’s Circle. It all sounds earnest and uplifting. Dull.)

At this, the presumable Mrs. Blaufelt enters the room. Sherlock heard her working at a typewriter keyboard in another room, but he would have deduced her anyway from the lack of dust on the furnishings and, similarly, the lack of crusted egg on Blaufelt’s clothes. Old men who live alone invariably have crusted egg on their shirtfronts and, frequently, their flies. It was therefore obvious that in Blaufelt’s case a living wife exists, who, however ancient, is more or less compos mentis.

She is entirely compos mentis. “Here,” she says, “take a look. Milt talks, I handle the inventory.” She holds out a box with half a dozen bows so beautiful that Sherlock’s mouth waters.

“Hm,” Sherlock replies, already forgetting her existence. He tuned his violin this morning, before he left Sarita at the subway station, but he can’t remember when he last played. He will play badly. He will be mocked and called a fraud. The Blaufelts will refuse to sell him a bow. His hands are shaking. There is cocaine to be had, just around the corner or a few blocks away, and he has over three thousand dollars in cash in his pocket. He sets his violin to his shoulder and raises the first of the splendid bows.

He plays the same music six times: Albinoni’s Sonata da chiesa No. 1 in D minor, the opening adagio. The Blaufelts listen motionless. Sherlock is consumed with the knowledge that he needs two of Milton Blaufelt’s bows, for the same reason that creatures are born with two kidneys. He returns the last of the six to its case and lays his violin across his lap. He should put the instrument away, but he fancies he can feel the last of the notes still trembling through its body.

“That’s a Dax, isn’t it,” Mrs. Blaufelt says at last.

Sherlock’s head snaps up.

“You don’t have a bow. And your clothes, a thrift store wouldn’t even put them in the three-for-a-dollar box. But you studied with Jacob, you play like an angel, and your fiddle is a Dax.” She studies Sherlock’s face. His arms are curled under the violin. His heart thuds. Why now, of all times, must he find himself the subject of attention from someone who is plainly not stupid? He knows he’s still underweight; he has to stop himself every minute from twitching his hands in and out of loose fists; and the sleeves of his faded and frayed shirt are rolled down, down, all the way down, in an un-air-conditioned apartment in New York City, in July.

The truth about the violin may have the virtue of supplying a misdirection. “I found it in a pawnshop in London.”

“Lucky.” Mrs. Blaufelt’s voice is — surprised and admiring? Sherlock seizes on that note:

“It was in the window, stood up or I’d have missed it. Terrible lighting, I can’t imagine how they hoped to sell anything, though as they had mainly rubbish I suppose the bad light showed their stock to advantage. As it was, I walked past and then it struck me what I had just seen.” _You’re talking too much, too much, she’ll know you’re talking to cover up._

“What tipped you off?”

Sherlock recalls the ugly display window. And in the corner, that presence. Waiting only for him to breathe on it. He shrugs. “Look at it.”

“The original owner didn’t know what he had.”

 _Obviously_. Impatience is familiar, comforting. Sherlock tries not to roll his eyes; Mrs. Blaufelt is still watching him carefully. Mr. Blaufelt is watching her. That is interesting, if Sherlock had the inclination to pursue it. He wants to go back to Sarita’s with two bows, though: something more important than any deduction he could make, just now, so he wills his focus toward appearing normal. “Or he was desperate to get any money at all.”

“An addict, maybe.” Looking square at him.

Dammit, dammit, why did he say that about being desperate? Sherlock presses his lips together and looks away. How do stupid people do it, act normal and pleasant all the time, somehow avoid revealing themselves, at least to one another? But Mrs. Blaufelt isn’t stupid.

“What happened to your bow?”

 _Cornered._ “I lost it.” _I sold it, I broke it, I don’t know_.

“But you won’t lose this one.”

He is putting away his violin, if only for something to do with his hands other than tear out his hair. It’s hopeless; he may as well speak. “Two. I wanted to buy two. Because if, thirty years from now—”

Mr. Blaufelt breaks in, not speaking to Sherlock: “He’ll make a fiddler. If he puts some work into it. If.”

The Blaufelts’ eyes meet. She turns to Sherlock: “Which two?”

In disbelief he touches the first, the fourth. She nods. “Say eleven hundred dollars.”

He counts out hundred-dollar bills, as fast as he can. The bows are worth this and more. At fifteen, Mrs. Blaufelt, frowning, holds up her palm: “Eleven hundred for both.”

Sherlock has frozen in the act of counting, his hands still in the air. He lowers them slowly to his lap. “You’re underselling,” he manages, at last.

“We’re old, we have plenty of money. Take care of the bows.”

Sherlock fits the first bow into the space in his violin case; Mrs. Blaufelt brings him a travel case for the second. “You fell on hard times, I think.”

Sympathy, she is showing sympathy. He checks the latches on the violin case, the bow case. Runs his hands over the cases. How to respond? “Well” — very softly — “more like jumped, perhaps.” He straightens. He hasn’t left yet: they may still change their minds. He would pay anything, but money seems to be beside the point. _Take care of the bows,_ she said.

“I’ll take care of them.” He nods at Mr. Blaufelt, at Mrs. Blaufelt, and he flees.

*

He plays for Sarita, that evening — she likes pop, so: Pink’s “There You Go” and “Most Girls,” U2’s “Beautiful Day,” the Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out,” the Proclaimers’ “500 Miles,” Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” He could hardly avoid learning these, given how often she plays them; anyway, the music has a certain giddiness that’s not unpleasant. Sarita even dances, a little.

*

On day seventy-seven, Sherlock buys some new clothes and a laptop. On day eighty, he packs his duffel bag and cooks breakfast for Sarita. He burns the eggs and the toast, absolutely not because he’s at all nervous, but at least the coffee isn’t catastrophically bad. “I thought … Miami.”

Sarita stops pushing the egg around on her plate and stares at him. “Miami is cocaine central, Sherlock.”

He shakes his head. “Not for me.”

She holds him in her arms for a good minute before she lets him out the door. And when he’s halfway down the building stairs she comes running after him, crying “Wait, wait, Sherlock, hold up!” and when he turns she shoves a bottle of sunscreen into his hands. It transpires that he finds himself embracing her, just for a moment.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sarita’s field of study is utter handwave. I picked the one article title I sort of understood from a 1998 issue of _Biochemistry:_ [“The Ice-Binding Site of Sea Raven Antifreeze Protein Is Distinct from the Carbohydrate-Binding Site of the Homologous C-Type Lectin.”](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bi9820513?journalCode=bichaw) Yes, the sea raven is a fish. However, Sarita studies the [winter flounder](http://www.gma.org/fogm/P_americanus.htm), because it seemed the antifreeze-producing fish likeliest to do well in aquaria of a size that I could imagine a university lab having. I don't even want to know how unrealistic this is, okay?  
>  The blood draw information comes from [this Canada Department of Fisheries and Oceans Animal-User Training Template](http://www.ccac.ca/Documents/Education/DFO/4_Blood_Sampling_of_Finfish.pdf).  
> For fish anesthesia, it’s [Wikipedia for the win](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricaine_mesylate).  
> As always, if someone with specialized expertise wants to school me, I’m glad to be schooled. 
> 
> Cocaine withdrawal doesn't resemble heroin withdrawal. Sherlock’s description of what Sarita can expect from him draws on [the Medline Plus information page](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000947.htm). 
> 
> Once upon a time ATMs, at least in New York City, commonly had a $200 daily withdrawal limit, so by the time Sherlock had withdrawn enough money to buy a bow of the quality he wants, it would have been Wednesday anyhow.
> 
> “Dax” was the sobriquet of the luthier Matthias Hornsteiner II. I know nothing about violins except for the big Cremona names; I wanted Sherlock to have something a little less obvious, and when I went shopping for him I found a beauty, which some other lucky bastard has now bought. By author-pleasing coincidence, the sound sample is a Bach sonata for solo violin that will reappear later in this fic. I can't make the link work right now, but meanwhile have some  
> catalogue copy:
>
>> Rare violin by Matthias Hornsteiner II, a.k.a. ‘Dax’ (Caressa et Français, Köstler). In addition to the great tradition of the Klotz dynasty, violin making in 18th century Mittenwald also entailed another style that was no less influential, a style attributed to Matthias Hornsteiner II, who was called ‘Dax.’ This particular violin is one of Hornsteiner's masterpieces and dates back to approximately 1770. It bears his original label and has all of the defining characteristics of the best Mittenwald instruments. The exceptionally lovely and very fine-grained spruce of the top is lacquered with a typical thin coat of darker varnish. Gentle, baroque soundholes and the expressive scroll on a long pegbox give the violin a highly distinctive profile. The instrument is in exceptionally good condition, with only superficial damage to an edge and two minimal repairs to the top — ‘authentique dans tous les parties,’ according to an original receipt from Caressa et Français in Paris from 18 April 1913. Our experienced luthier looked over this antique piece thoroughly and made it ready to play. The delicate, nuanced and singing voice of this violin is solid confirmation of its builder's mastery. With a certificate issued by the renowned expert Hieronymus Köstler, Stuttgart.”
> 
> It's gorgeous. 


	9. Consulting Detective

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “How did you get in here?”  
> “I have a good suit and I was carrying a folder.”

Lestrade walks into his office on the afternoon of Monday, May 14, 2001, having just consigned to a holding cell an especially repugnant killer (“Woman Ditches Abusive Boyfriend for Really Nice Guy; Two Dead”), and, apparently not under arrest for a change, but rather having freely chosen to sit in Lestrade’s guest chair, is Sherlock Holmes. His hands are folded in his lap. His suit is — wait, is it meant to fit like that? His hair is notably clean. A manila folder lies in front of him, on Lestrade’s desk.

“How did you get in here?”

Holmes’s lips are pressed together. Lestrade might call the look determined. Anxious, even. But it’s never been easy to tell what Holmes feels — though he feels something, Lestrade imagines; he has never been able to quite forget Holmes thrusting the hyacinth macaw at him, demanding he call the avian vet. To prime Lestrade for recommending rehab? Maybe, but that seems like playing a long game, even for someone as obviously clever as Holmes, and if you were trying to manipulate a cop into looking kindly on you, wouldn’t you butter him up while you demonstrated your concern for rare wildlife, instead of coming all over posh, insulting git?

“I have a good suit and I was carrying a folder.”

 _So that’s a good suit,_ Lestrade wants to reply. _I did wonder._

“Yes, it is,” Holmes says: absent, matter-of-fact, as if reading Lestrade’s mind on a brief detour from something more important. Those strange light eyes hold Lestrade’s for a moment without blinking, and then Holmes picks up the folder and holds it out.

Lestrade takes it, crosses to his seat, begins leafing through. After three pages he looks up. Then back down. Sheet after sheet after sheet of test results. One each week for the past four months. Arranged chronologically. Recording that Sherlock Holmes has urinated in a cup, whilst observed by a member of clinic staff, and has tested negative for metabolites of cocaine and other illicit drugs. Every week for four months. Lestrade pages through. Pages through again. “Well,” he says, “congratulations. Four months is a long time.”

“A year. But I didn’t get back to London till January.”

Lestrade stares at him.

“Give me your cold case files.”

“ _What?”_

“I’ll solve them for you. I’ll— I can. You know I can solve them. The case with the macaw. The Bessing murder. I can.”

 _While we’re reading minds,_ Lestrade thinks, _did I just hear a “Please”?_

Holmes’s lips part, close again. And this more than anything decides Lestrade, that Holmes can’t bring himself to say it. The brain behind that shielded careful face is frantic for something to exert itself upon, and hasn’t got it. Lestrade can almost smell the metal scorching against metal. To bring Lestrade four months’ worth of urine test results — to have subjected himself to four months of being watched in the act of urinating, every week, in the hope of being given something to do with himself — that’s abject enough. But if Holmes says “Please,” he will be begging outright. It’s one thing to be turned down if you haven’t begged, but if you have …

“All right,” Lestrade says. “Wait here. I’ll bring you a set of files. You’ll read them in my office, nowhere else. You’ll come again tomorrow, at two, and I’ll give you more or you can finish up with the ones you already have. If I’m not here, I’m at a crime scene or whatever, you don’t come in. If I have to leave for any reason, so do you. Agreed?”

“Yes,” Holmes says, “yes. Agreed.”

 


End file.
